


Nightmares

by thesecondseal



Series: Acts of Reclamation [10]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Dream Sex, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Grief/Mourning, Humor, Lyrium Addiction, Lyrium Withdrawal, Mutual Masturbation, Nightmares, POV Multiple, Resolved Sexual Tension, Sex Talk, Sexual Content, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-04-23 23:44:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 35,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4896844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecondseal/pseuds/thesecondseal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Essa returns from the Western Approach. Plagued by nightmares, the Inquisition prepares for the siege of Adamant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Warrior

_"Do you miss it?” she asks, voice low and tempting as she shifts beneath him._

_Her skin is warm and she is perfect but for the music that moves through her in trembling cyan. There is something wrong in her voice, and he has heard that twinned dissonance before. Still, it is not enough to chase him from her. If she must be killed, such horrors can wait. He places a kiss in valley of her elbow, tongue laving her leaping, soaring pulse. He pulls her flesh into his mouth, worries at her with teeth and tongue until he can taste the promise of blood and lyrium humming against his lips. The barrier of her skin is all that lies between him and the soft glow that sings in her veins._

_“You know that I do,” he murmurs, dragging his teeth down to the spider web of blue at her wrist._

_She shivers and he thinks about sinking deeper into the playful bite. He has already left so many marks upon her. They stand out against her skin, darker than scars of blade or sun._

_“Sometimes I wonder,” she says dragging her hands through his hair. He pulls one nipple into his mouth and her hands become fists. When she speaks again, the words are jagged on the edges. “If that is what drew you to me. The familiar…”_

_But he doesn’t want to hear her wonderings, nor the ragged pleasure that limns her words. He slides into her and she groans, eyes falling shut against sensation. Her blood heats and the scent of lyrium rises off of her like perfume._

_“The control.”_

_She moves against him, arching up, making her accusation into falsehood as she drives them both relentlessly against passion’s shoals. Cullen’s hands wrap around her biceps, his hips pushing hard into hers until she stutters, broken and gasping toward stillness._

_“Control is an illusion,” he mutters. He has heard the words before, is pretty sure they came from her._

_Essa laughs softly. She fights against his hold, arms bruising bright and incandescent. She is a vessel, he realizes, and she is flawed, fragmenting around him until she is awash of silvery blue._

_“It is,” she agrees. She manages to move enough against him to steal his breath. “There is only surrender.”_

_“You know nothing of surrender.”_

_At this moment, it is the only truth he knows._

_She smiles and then he is driving into her, every thrust, every flex of his hands against her arms a punishment for which she only offers praise. Her fingers tangle in the covers at her side and she moves against him, desperate now that she is caged. She is burning up and Cullen watches the luminescence war beneath her skin, fire and lightning, in shades of immolation. Sweat blossoms like dew at her throat, beneath her breasts. Each bead a slow coalescence, thick and sweet as honey, shimmering and blue over every patch of abraded skin._

_“Perhaps we should both learn,” she whispers._

_Her lips are blue as she lifts them for his kiss and Cullen has bowed his head without thinking, fallen prostrate before a goddess he knows is not his. He sips glory from her skin, he finds his release on the edge of painful abruptness. She murmurs nonsense, the cadence as familiar as the Chant as he pulls way. He makes his way down her body, lips searching for each precious shimmer before he laps communion from the hollow of her navel. The familiar sacrament slides down his throat with blistering purpose and a cold, stark clarion rings as if he has struck the sound from her. It resonates through his bones, echoing and empty._

_“It’s about time,” she says sharply, not sounding like Essa at all and when Cullen looks up the treasured curves of her body are gone. Essa’s eyes are as blue as diamonds, hard and exacting. Ice instead of fire. Her face shifts, becomes that of a stranger before he recognizes ivory and platinum and an unforgiving stare._

_“You know your duty, knight-captain.” The words are cold and flat and he is on his knees now, hard stone beneath his shins. Meredith stands over him holding a too familiar wooden box. “This foolish rebellion has gone on long enough.”_

“You have to wake up,” Cole’s voice reached urgently through the walls of the dream, drew Cullen out amid the first surge of panic. “You don’t want this and you won’t let me make you forget.”

Cullen dragged himself upright, eyes blinking in the early morning shadow. Dawn was too far away to be a comfort. Cole handed him a tankard of water and he drank without hesitation, the bright taste of mint chasing away the lingering memory of lyrium on Essa’s skin.

“Thank you.”

“I tried to wake you sooner.” The apology in Cole’s soft words was enough to get Cullen’s feet beneath him. Concern for others always came more easily to him than wasting such for himself.

“It’s alright,” he assured him.  It was hardly the first dream he’d had of Essa naked and willing in his arms, nor likely to be the last. The lyrium cravings were a fresh misery, well not by themselves. He had nearly gotten used to dreaming in silver and blue, but never had his longings tangled in quite such a dreadful way. “Thank you, Cole. I am…glad not to have seen the end of that dream.”

Cole nodded. “It was all lies,” he said. He pulled his hat off, stared through disheveled hair until Cullen met his earnest gaze through the gloom. “Lies,” he repeated firmly. “She will never smell blue.”

He waited for Cullen’s slow nod. “You should talk to her.”

And then Cole vanished, leaving Cullen to face a day that had no room for nightmares. There was a siege to plan, maneuvers and requisitions, and countless worries for which he had no time. If in all of that he found a single spare moment in his day, that moment was for Essa. She was home and, knowing her, she would be leaving again the next day or the one thereafter. She was more restless than ever now that they finally understood the extent of what had happened to the Wardens. Cullen knew that if she thought she could breach Adamant’s walls herself, she would have already charged the fortress with her most trusted.

If only it were that simple.

It was late afternoon before Cullen’s aching head drove him from his duties, though he let Cassandra take the blame for his forced respite. When she badgered him into taking a half hour for himself, Cullen did not put up nearly as much of a fight as he normally would have. The dream still lay thickly in the back of his mind, the remembered scent of lyrium closer than the box he kept locked in his desk drawer. He found himself too grateful for the escape. He stepped out onto the battlements and turned his face up to the warmth of the sun.

“Eat something,” Cassandra groused, thrusting toward him the neglected lunch basket Nadie had brought him hours before. “That’s an order, Commander.”

“Yes, Seeker Pentaghast.”

“An hour,” she amended, punishing him for insolence masked as contrition. Cullen almost chuckled when she pushed him toward the stairs.

 *

“When was the last time you took lyrium?” he asked.

Essa knew that he did not mean for the question to sound accusatory. She was a mage after all. Lyrium was much less of a danger to her and commonly taken to replenish lost mana….blah blah blah. She had never cared what the reasons were.  Still, Cullen’s query caught her as off guard as his sudden appearance in the stable. She was slow to turn to face him.

“I’m not entirely sure,” she admitted, shoving her hair from her face with a dusty hand. She frowned. “I suppose when I brought Glenis back from the sloth demon.”

“In Ostwick?” His voice was too carefully controlled, the disbelief held tightly between his back teeth.

Essa nodded slowly, brushed her hands off on the legs of her breeches and gave Geri a pat before exiting the Forder’s stall.

“Yes,” she said, and could only hope the words were calm. “In Ostwick.”

He was standing rigidly in the aisle of the stable, perfectly shined plate and impeccably kept hair utterly at odds with her most comfortable setting. There were days they both enjoyed her mussing that image, but today she knew he needed his armor. Maybe she did too.

“What’s this about, Cullen?”

He reached for her, but his hand shook and she knew that the hard fist he made to stop the trembling was not a grip he wanted on her. He took a step away, held his hands tightly before him, one hand on the pommel of his sword, the other holding tight the handle of a lunch basket.

“It has—”

He broke off, and paced a few steps farther into the barn, dropping the basket onto a bench before he started back toward her, long strides sharp and deliberate.

“It has a distinctive scent,” he stated as if he were discussing the weather.

Essa nodded. “A song,” she added. “Cloying and sweet like grave flowers.”

His eyes flashed in surprise and finally–finally!–met hers.

“I thought—“ He stumbled for a moment, frowned. Renewed his pacing. “I have never heard a mage describe it so.”

She didn’t laugh at him, and the fact that he looked as if he expected her to made Essa rage. How often had his concerns been dismissed by those he trusted? Too often, she thought, doing her best to hide her anger. He didn’t need it, she knew that. If he hadn’t looked so lost and confused, she might have teased him, might have asked him if he had discussed with many mages their practices with or opinions on lyrium, but no. There was something fragile about him pacing through the afternoon’s gilding, dust motes stirring around him in the barn air. Essa didn’t think it would be wise for her to know the names of the faces she now wanted to punch.

“The draught that we are given to enter the Fade is not the same as the mana restoratives,” she told him matter-of-factly. “Before I turned myself over to the Circle, I promised myself to never use the latter. I’m afraid my Harrowing confirmed my prejudices.”

He paused, a half dozen paces between them, and still Essa looked away.

“But you would have had to take that same heavy dosage every time you went in to free someone who was trapped,” he mused quietly.

Her experiences at Ostwick’s Circle were not her favorite subjects. Nor his.

“I did,” she confirmed. “And mage or not, I don’t doubt that the abuse would have eventually killed me.”

She had been a fool, but she had saved lives, so she could hardly fault herself for consenting to be their tool. She laughed. 

“I thought it had more than once.”

Cullen’s pacing brought him back to her again. Essa lifted one hand slowly, giving him every opportunity to pull away as she placed her palm against his cheek. His eyes closed, and the sigh that followed took most of the tension from his body.

“You smell like hay and sunshine,” he murmured, so softly she almost missed the words.

“And horse and sweat,” she added, clinging to humor so that he wouldn’t hear the tears crowding her throat. She didn’t know what had drawn his pain so close to the surface, but she wanted to lance every injury, let the taint seep out into the light between them so that his wounds could finally heal clean.

“Yes,” Cullen agreed with a smile, and her heart leapt. For one stumbling moment Essa was certain he knew her thoughts. “But you never smell of lyrium.”

He opened his eyes, and she felt them on her skin like sunlight as he reached up to take her hand in his. His grip was gentle and steady.  She raised her brows as he brought her palm to his lips, heedless of the remaining dirt she hadn’t been able to quite scrub away. Cullen placed a warm peck on the cleanest spot he could find.

“And I had to know why.” The words pressed against her skin, and Essa’s fingers curled gently, the tips dragging through his stubble.

“Cullen—“

He stopped her thoughts with another kiss, this one higher, lips grazing the pulse at her wrist. Essa fought through a spike of desire to answer the fullness of a question he could not possibly realize he had asked. She licked her lips, drew in a breath, and nearly lost her resolve when the cool, clean scent of him teased past the sweet pungency of hay and grain and horse. She took a step closer, came to her senses only when her chest met plate.

“When I killed my brother, his eyes were still shining with blue fire,” she confessed quickly, ruthlessly. “I swore that lyrium would never again leave such a mark on my life. I have a hard enough time seeing that fire in my own eyes.”

Essa glanced away, and was about to pull away from him when Cullen murmured, “It’s not the same color blue.”

“No?” Her voice trembled on a question she had never dared ask.

“No.”

His arms slid around her then, lifting her against him as his hands splayed across her back.

“Have you had anything to eat?” he asked and she took the change of subject with gladness.

“Not since the impossibly long brunch my sister and my other advisors subjected me to this morning. They seem to think that if they feed me I won’t notice them picking me and plying me with information.”

“I brought food,” he offered with a nod toward the basket. “But no hidden agenda. If you have some time.”

“For you?” She lost the teasing edge of her words when he nuzzled her cheek. “Always.”

Cullen chuckled, and the mirth rumbled in the quiet space between them. “I would really like to kiss you now.”

He smiled at her, tentative in ways she could not remember seeing him. Essa grabbed the fur of his collar with both hands and pulled herself up on her toes. She grinned at him, watched his answering smirk chase away any lingering hesitancies.

“I would really like for you to kiss me now.”

His lips caught hers,  a gentle questing that caught the end of her sentence. Essa sighed against his mouth, and kissed him back with every patience, content to let the shadows of memory slide away in the afternoon light.


	2. Ficlet: Shadow Puppets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously written fluffy ficlet, first person, Essa's pov. The first time Essa sleeps over. (emphasis on sleep, except only Cullen sleeps because: Essa)

"Are you  _certain_  that’s a rabbit?” Cullen asked, laughter filling his voice.

He placed a trail of kisses along the curving scar that ran across my floating ribs. I didn’t know what it did to a body to lose those bones, but I’d nearly found out not long ago. He was still unhappy about the dragon, but he was terrible at punishing me for my carelessness. 

“It is,” I insisted. “Look! There are the ears.”

My lips hurt from grinning. I could have sworn we had been laughing for hours. I stared at my right hand, carefully moving my fingers into a slight variation of its initial position. I waggled my fingers, watched as the shape of the shadow on the wall changed.

“Well, it’s terrible,” he pronounced, settling again with his head on my stomach. 

He caught my not so rabbit-shaped hand in his and uncrimped my fingers, stretching them out and placing small, light kisses on the tip of each. He turned my palm to his face and nuzzled my hand before pressing a much more intimate kiss at its center. The light of the anchor wavered against the walls of the loft. My body wound tight and my left hand clenched against the surge he seemed to so easily call within me.

“Uh-uh,” he whispered against my skin. “Get the light back up there. I’ll show you the proper way to make a shadow rabbit.”

That we could play with such magic was a bit of a miracle, one I held my breath and refused to mention as I opened my left hand and angled it carefully to throw bright emerald light against the stones. He placed one last kiss on my right before letting go and I watched a much more life-like looking rabbit take shape on the wall.

“Hey, no fair,” I complained. “That takes two hands.” I waved the anchor a little as a reminder. “I can only use one.”

“Well then, maybe you should stick with simple shapes,” he recommended so seriously that I dared hope he was going to suggest something useful. “Like a rock, or a turtle.”

I popped him playfully on the back and we both laughed. He flew doves amid the varying shades of green and I tried to pay attention to how he did it. Hope would find the skill intriguing; I could pass it along through Fin. He would soon be able to sneak a visit to my daughter. I hadn’t seen her in…well long enough that I was glad she had a true mother who wasn’t me.

I stretched slowly, casting us closer into darkness as I closed my hand.

“I should get going,” I said, rubbing my legs against his and basking in the comfort of us. “You need to get some sleep.”

I was leaving in the morning for an inspection of our staging camp and I could doze while I rode. He, on the other hand, had far more work to do.

“Stay,” he murmured against my skin.

I ran my hand through his hair, playing lightly with the heavy curls.

“You need to sleep,” I repeated.

“Stay.”

We still hadn’t figured out who was the most obstinate. My breath caught as his arms wrapped around me and he snuggled close.

“Sleep here with me.” His voice had grown heavy. “There’s a huge hole in the ceiling, Es. You will be able to see the sky if you wake in the night. At least here, I won’t worry about you rolling off the damned balcony.”

This last was mumbled sleepily. I reached for my glove and pulled it on, used the physical act to manifest my will quieting the anchor and granting us truer darkness.

“Fine,” I said, leaning to drop a kiss on top of his head. “But you have to know I’m not going to roll of the balcony. The rails are quite high.”

“Alright,” he agreed.

He pulled the sheet up over most of us. I watched in wonder as Cullen’s breathing evened out. We had never slept together, though I had fallen asleep beside his bed the night before. I still wasn’t fond of sleeping inside and Josie had been scandalized when I suggested moving one of the giant Fereldan canopied beds out into the garden. I would have slept in the stable permanently had Blackwall not beaten me to claiming the space. As it was I had been spending most nights at Skyhold on my balcony.

“I love you,” I whispered, certain that he was asleep.

“I love you,” he answered, softly. “Even if you can’t make a decent shadow rabbit to save your life.”

 


	3. Heart Ties

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightmare number two, prompted by theMightyZan who really wanted to see Cullen find Essa with someone and not care at all about his feelings. tw for that. And also scary icky dreams where you aren't yourself and there is smutty stuff. :( It does at least end pretty fluffily.

_Cullen does not recognize the man with Essa, but he knows with the cold, clear certainty of dreams that it is Diarmont Stanhope who stands with his arms around the woman Cullen loves. She is laughing and crying, and he can hear the tremulous joy in her voice as she wraps her arms around her husband’s neck, drags his lips down to the curve of her smile._

_“I have missed you so much,” Diar whispers and the soft declaration drifts across the deserted garden, each word louder than it should be, each syllable a strike Cullen cannot block._

_“No more than I have missed you.”_

_He has lost her then, and Cullen cannot help but understand that this choking grief was inevitable._

_There is too much silence, as if all of Skyhold has held its breath in anticipation of this reunion. Essa stands with Diar before the statue of Andraste, in a familiar fall of pure white linen, and now there are birds singing in the outstretched hands of the Divine’s benediction._

_“I will love you always,” Essa promises, renewing vows Cullen realizes she has never broken._

_“Forever.” Diar agrees. His face is the only shadow in the garden, but Cullen knows that he smiling down at Essa. “Until we are both ash and song.”_

_Cullen would retreat if his legs were at all his own.  They are not. He stands frozen in the keep’s shadows, helpless to do anything but watch the scene unfold. Essa steps back, releases Diar slowly with a secretive smile. She turns her back to Diar and Cullen is terrified that she will see him lurking the dark._

_"You are wearing too much.”_

_The teasing words are for Diar. She tosses them back over her shoulder as she begins to slowly slip the wide collar of her gown from her shoulders, but her gaze does not follow. Her eyes are bright and mocking as she finds Cullen beneath the colonnade and he cannot look away._

_The chain around Cullen’s neck is sharp, biting, the medallion that hangs beside his heart becomes a scorching weight. He must return it, he thinks, hand fumbling desperately with the Stanhope crest. It is not his. Could never be his._

_The gown pools at her feet, and Essa’s beloved pulls her back roughly against him. He trails kisses down the side of her neck and when his fingers find one peaked nipple, Essa’s head falls back on his shoulder with a moan. They are gilded in sunlight, bright enough that he squints against the onslaught, and yet his stare remains as trapped as he is._

_“Who is that?” Diar asks. His other hand smooths down her torso, palm skimming over silvery scars toward dark curls._

_Essa lifts her head, but Cullen knows that her vision is already blurred with pleasure. She reaches back for Diar and a smug grin stretches her lips when her caresses drag a groan from him._

_“Ignore him," Essa murmurs, breathless with passion. “He is nothing.”_

_Cullen does not even think to question the words his waking mind knows she would never say._

“I will murder you!” Essa’s angry shout dragged Cullen blearily from the grip of sleep.

“Essa?”

The sound of her crying in the dark was as unnatural as her cold dismissal in his dream. For a moment Cullen reeled, fearing that he was caught in layers of nightmare. It would not be the first time.

He nearly stepped on her, all but leaping from his bed, his mind slowly processing the exclamation. That she wasn’t beside him was not unusual. They had taken too easily to bunking together but for Essa that always involved something unusual. She might start out curled around him, but often enough he woke to find her on the floor beside his bed.

“Please,” she whispered, tears soaking the broken entreaty.

_She is trapped in the dream and the knowledge does nothing to diminish the horrors of the Fade. There is a familiar body behind her and she has responded to his every touch as if she has longed only and ever for him._

_“Please.”_

_She is begging and the nightmare would have her believe that she wants him with too-familiar desperation, but Essa knows that she doesn’t. He has spun the web of this dream carelessly. Cullen should never have been here, and though he is gone, she can still taste the lingering cruelty of the lies that passed her lips. She closes her eyes, focuses on the heartbreak she saw in his amber stare and she is fortified by his pain._

_“I thought I killed you.” Essa mutters._

_There is laughter. It rolls, warm and sweet against the back of her neck. In the waking world she shudders, cringes against the attack, but here she yearns._

_“As long as you are in the world, my love, I will never die.”_

_It is the only truth that has been spoken and Essa clings to it. “But you will never truly live either,” she spits the words into the collapsing dream, watches the garden fade around them like a ruined watercolor._

_“You showed your hand too soon,” she whispers._

_“You will not remember,” he says, smile twisting. He wrenches her head to the one side, fingers bruising her jaw as his mouth seals over hers. She sinks her teeth into his lip, tears flesh in a spray of blood._

_“I will murder you,” Essa shouts into the darkness._

“Essa.”

Cullen’s hands were on her arms, his grip steady as he pulled her from the dark. The floor scraped her knees, splinters catching linen and tender skin as she fought to reach him.

“Essa.” Her name repeated, a murmured calling, then a sharp command. “Essa.”

Her hands fumbled over him, fingers grasping helplessly at his chest as she murmured wordless defiances against the memories that pursued her.

“Essa, wake up.” Cullen caught her hands in his. “Wake up, my darling.”

It was the endearment that brought her back to herself. Essa stilled within the cage of his arms and opened her eyes to a darkness brighter than her nightmares. Skyhold’s stalwart presence settled around her and with it the velvet night, a balm with the promise of dawn lingering beyond the stars and dewdrops.

“Cullen?” Essa sounded fragile to her own ears, but she did not chide herself for her sob of relief when his face appeared before her bleary eyes and he held her as if all was forgiven.

“I’m here.”

He looked as battered as she felt, eyes tight with worry and lack of sleep, and Essa remembered all the reasons she had thought that their sleeping in the same room was a bad idea. In two days, Cullen would be leading an army across Orlais--her army--to lay siege to fortress filled with Grey Wardens and abominations; he needed whatever rest he could get.

“I am here too.” Cole’s voice rose up from the office below.

Cullen smiled slightly. “And so is Cole.”

The sour sting of panic was slowly fading from her limbs. Essa stretched cautiously, tugging her hands free of his and wrapping her arms around him in a quick hug.

“You can let go of me now.” She tried for teasing, but the words were warped, twisted with grief and helplessness.

“Do you want me to?” he asked.

Of course she didn’t want him to. “We should probably get off of the floor.” She took a breath. “Did I hurt you?”

“No.” But that single syllable had taken too long.

“Light,” Essa warned, thrusting one hand out and up toward the bedside table. Cullen didn’t flinch when the candles flared, bright and sure behind them. Another night Essa would have marveled at the progress they were making, but not tonight. Tonight she was still mired in the darkest cruelties of the Fade.

“Let me see.”

Essa ignored his protests, struggling out his embrace to kneel on the floor before him. Cullen didn’t sleep in much, something he had admitted while she grinned at his stilted protests of practicality, claiming it quicker to throw on his gear and armor if he didn’t have to struggle out of sleeping clothes first.

“Es…”

He was not unaffected by her regard, but Essa was determined to remained focused. There were no new bruises on his fair skin, nothing beyond the usual injuries from training and the increasingly familiar scars that marked his skin in silvery rose.

“Hush.” She bit her lip, traced her eyes over the ragged knife scar that ran low along his ribs. Her fingers skimmed up his side and she watched in fascination his skin flushed. She glanced up at his face.

Four slowly welting rows puckered at his throat. Dread hit her in frigid cascade.

“Cullen—“

She leaned over him and he caught her hand before she could press healing to the scratches.

“You didn’t hurt me,” he insisted gruffly. He held on, expression inscrutable when she struggled futilely in his grip.

“Essa. Leave it.” The order was terse. “You didn’t even break the skin.”

She surrendered reluctantly, releasing the gather of her magic. She was likely to do more harm fighting him now than she had in her sleep. She remained poised over him, the tails of her shirt grazing the hard ridges of his stomach, and the absurdity of the entire situation hit her like badly thrown lightning.

“I’m sorry.” She sat back abruptly and his hand gentled on hers.

Cullen shook his head. “We knew it would be difficult.” But instead of pushing her away, he drew her back down into his arms. “And if you ever decide this isn’t worth it, you can go back to sleeping in the stable.”

She sank down over him, hips sliding into the v of his legs.

“It’s not worth hurting you,” she muttered as she relaxed against him.

He chuckled. “I suffer worse for love of Sera." Cullen tugged on a lock of hair and Essa glanced up at him. “So far, I believe we’re doing rather well. This is the first time I’ve had to drag a wild mabari from her den and I only have a few scratches to show for it.”

Essa glared at him. “You’re seriously not upset,” she accused.

“Not about that, no. Waking to find you crying under my bed…” he cleared his throat. “That I am very upset about.”

“Is that why Cole is here?” Cole had, on occasion kept her company after the worst of her dreams, but not since she had begun attempting to sleep with Cullen when she was back at Skyhold.

“I came to help,” Cole called from below before Cullen could answer. “He does not want me to leave, but he can only look at you. Even if he doesn’t want to.”

Cullen’s breath caught and the warmth of his embrace warred with the sudden taut line of his body. Essa waited, her patience crumbling beneath every question she was too afraid to ask.

“Yes. Well…” Cullen’s words broke on a frustrated sigh. “He’s not wrong,” he admitted.

“You don’t want to look at me?” She tried to move away again, but he held fast.

“About me not wanting him to leave.” There were shadows in his eyes and he wouldn’t quite meet her stare. “I don’t want you to leave either.”

He caught her chin with one hand, fingers whispering against her skin, brushing away the memories of a bruising grip.

“Do you understand?” he asked quietly. “There is nothing, in my nightmares or yours, that would make me give up on us.”

She was drowning in amber, and if she believed nothing else, Essa knew those words were true.

“I’m not going anywhere.” She relaxed against him, chin on his sternum as she stared up toward at his face. “Why does it feel as if you were the one who had the nightmare?”

His hand tightened and he released her chin quickly. “Because your shouts woke me from my own.”

“I’m sorry.”

He frowned down at her in confusion and this time it was Essa who glanced away. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“I do,” she replied, even knowing that her dream could not have touched him.

“Come here.”

His hands closed on her arms and he scooted her up until his lips were a breath from hers. There was only linen between them, and not nearly enough layers. For a moment, Essa could think of nothing but losing herself in him.

“Cullen—“

But the nightmare still hung just behind them, sharp and punishing, too many leagues empty of all but the Fade’s bitterest sorrow.  She could still taste blood on her tongue and she would not taint him.

“It was the same.” Cole appearing beside them.

“I’m sorry,” he added when Cullen tensed at his sudden appearance. “But you have to know. Now. Before you deal wounds with false fears.”

 _He knew it wasn’t you_ , Cole’s words were in Essa’s head, offering comfort.  _You think it was, but_ we _know better._

“What was the same, Cole?” Essa sat up, turning so that she was shielding Cullen as he sat up behind her and dragged the blanket from the bed to cover them both.

“It made a mistake. With the dream. You shared it.” Cole settled down before them, legs crossed, elbows resting on the inside of his knees. Completely unconcerned with anyone’s modesty. “It doesn’t know you shared it. Because I helped. It hurt you, but I helped.”

Cullen leaned back against the side of the bed, and tugged Essa back with him. She could feel the tension in his arms at the nonsensical litany. He had come a long way from his rampant distrust of the spirit, but tonight his tolerance would have been thin for anyone. She reached for his hand, and laced their fingers together. She leaned back, arranging the blanket as she parsed Cole’s words.

“Cole.” She waited for him to look at her. “You did something so that Cullen and I shared the same dream?”

“Yes.” She could hear the relief in his voice. She understood him more easily than most—the twist of his thoughts was not so different from her own—but it wore on him, constantly trying to explain himself so that people would understand. “It was his first, but then you were there.”

Trapped, Essa thought. In a nightmare so close to her own that she had never doubted it.

“Why?” Cullen asked.

She knew that he was not content with the single question, but it was both the simplest and most likely to garner a full explanation from Cole. Essa slid farther back, body fitting snuggly into the open cage of his arms and legs. Her hips snugged against him, just right or just wrong, and Cullen’s fingers tightened in hers.  She foolishly hoped the low light hid their blushes.

“Smooth,” Cole offered as if in agreement. “Not a stone, but a hearth’s warmth.”

Cullen hid his face behind her, muttered curses she couldn’t quite hear and then Essa was laughing, could only chortle helplessly as her body jostled against Cullen’s. He poked her in the ribs for her insolence, mirth rumbling through his chest a breath before his chuckles joined hers. Cole grinned at both of them, and when his head tipped back, a bright chorus lifted toward the sky and the acrid residue of Essa’s dream was finally driven away by the persistence of home.

“Not another word, Cole.” Essa wiped tears from her eyes as she nudged Cole with her one foot. “But thank you.”

She could feel his answering grin in her mind.

“Now,” she took a breath. “Why did you bind our dreams?”

“It thought it had you trapped,” he explained, catching her foot and holding it in his hands like a kitten. “But it doesn’t know you. I know you. Trapped together you can fight.”

At Cole’s declaration, Cullen wrapped his arms more tightly around her.  He tucked his chin against her shoulder and Essa pressed her temple close to his.

“Yes,” she murmured, and felt stronger for the affirmation. “Whatever it is, we can fight it together.”

Cole nodded, pulled his hat from his head so that she could see the approval in his pale, earnest eyes.

“I will find you later, when the sun is up and Cullen isn’t worrying about being naked.”

Essa caught his grin before he vanished.

“Cullen isn’t naked,” the man in question grumbled behind her.

Essa laughed. “Pretty close,” she argued. “I’m wearing more clothes than you.”

“Only because you stole my shirt.”

She smiled. “It’s a good shirt,” she shrugged. “Great linen, smells of all my favorite scents.”

“Except horse,” he retorted dryly, climbing to his feet, and hauling her along with him. “Back to bed.”

“I’m not going to be able to sleep. “ She warned. Then smirked. “That’s not what I meant.”

Cullen shook his head, eyes lit with amusement.

“No,” he agreed. “But I’d like to hold you for a bit.”

He straightened the covers and Essa tried—and failed—not to ogle him as he did so. She waited until he was stretched out on his back, then burrowed close against his side, cheek over his heart. For a long moment there was stillness, the only sounds that of the flickering candles and caught breaths. Then Cullen rubbed his chin across her hair, catching flyaways with his scruff until she squirmed.

“Cullen?”

“Essa?”

She scowled at him, trusting he did not need to see the expression to know that it was there.

“I can take it back,” she offered.

She reached up for Diar’s medallion. As far as she knew, he hadn’t taken it off since he offered to keep it safe for her.

“Do you want it back?”

She shook her head against him. “But I don’t want you bearing my burdens.”

She knew that they had to talk about the dream, but she wasn’t ready. Would never be ready.

“I thought part of this,” he ran one hand down her back in a lazy caress. “Was bearing each other’s burdens.”

“Seems you carry more of mine than you will let me carry of yours.”

“Untrue,” he dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “Es—I—“

He huffed out a breath and started again. “I know that it’s ridiculous, but I feel that I must tell you, I would never stand between you and—“

He broke off. “This is ridiculous,” he repeated.

“My dead husband,” Essa offered gently. She felt his nod against her hair. “Cullen, I know. His memory… you would never ask me to let go of that.”

She waved her hand and the candles extinguished. It was a cowardly move, but she could see no way around it, not with what she felt compelled to say.

“Whatever was in that dream though,” she fidgeted with the edge of the blanket. “That was no memory.”

“I know, and we’ll get to that.”

Essa nodded. “But while we are denying impossible future crimes against one another, I need to tell you something.”

The words crowded at the back of her throat until she feared she would have to blurt them into the darkness above them. “If he was to suddenly reappear…and I mean actually him, not some torment from the Fade…”

Cullen lay beneath her, impossibly still. His heart galloped against her cheek and Essa nearly lost her courage.

“Well, first of all, I would be pissed that he didn’t get in touch with me for ten years,” she laughed, cringed at the forced, hollow sound. She reached up to rub at the crooked bridge of her nose and sighed in frustration.

“I’m not that girl anymore.” Her voice broke and she fought for her next confession. “And I’m not who she would have grown to be. Do you understand?”

“I think I do,” he said quietly.

Essa frowned, suddenly and unreasonably mad at everything. “I’m saying that if he showed up tomorrow, Cullen Rutherford. I would still be here with you.”

She had thought it would kill her to say so, but there it was, the truth was loud, but not as abrasive as she had feared. Guilt’s hooks slid away, sharp and glancing, but the barbs didn’t quite catch.

Cullen’s breath left him in a rush. “Why do you always sound so angry with me when you come to these sorts of revelations?”

He cupped her face in his hands and Essa glared up at him.

“Because I am angry,” Essa retorted. “Volatile. Isn’t that what you all call me when you go squawking to Fin for help?”

But she wasn’t angry at him. Was more angry at not being angry than anything. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She hid both behind her scowl.

“We don’t squawk. And I can handle your anger.” Cullen’s voice drifted across her lips. “Just not your tears.”

“Well—“

Her words were muffled by his mouth, she felt him smile as he pulled away just enough to say, “Essa, shut up.”

“ _You_  shut—“

Cullen kissed her again.


	4. Storm Watch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a recently discovered drabble, wherein Cullen and Cari share the watches waiting for Essa's return from a short trip to the Hinterlands.

Thunder boomed close enough that Cari flinched as the fury of the storm spread brilliant webs across the night.  Caution, as instinctive as the most primitive terrors, urged her away from the window, but Cari resisted every impulse to scurry to her bed. She stood—as always—in defiance of childhood fears, watched with an unwavering gaze as silver-white fractured the greater darkness.

“She’s fine, you know.” Cullen’s reassurances were always born of a faith Cari could not fathom. Lately, she found herself dreading Essa’s every departure and worrying over her every return.

“They’re caught in this mess,” Cari gestured toward the window with a gentle lift of chin. “They should have arrived tonight and now they’re caught on the road—“

Cari’s worries became a yelp of fright as the room shook beneath another roll of thunder and lightning flashed, stealing her vision and filling her mouth with a bitter sting. The storm was setting upon them in earnest, as if the Maker himself had taken offense at the Winter Palace’s secrecy and decadence.

“Cari.”

She turned slowly toward Cullen, her arms folded tightly, as if adding bars to the cage that held her rapidly beating heart.  When had he stopped calling her Lady Trevelyan? 

Probably about the same time she cut her hair.

“I’m sorry.”

Cullen shook his head to negate her words. The man seemed to tolerate apologies only marginally better than her sister did. Cari didn’t want to like him.

“You needn’t be,” he said quietly. “She worries about you as well.”

They all treated her as if she were fragile, despite considerable efforts she had made to prove the contrary. Cullen was the worst. At least Josephine and Leliana forgot to be careful with her when it was more convenient to treat Cari as tool rather than person. Not Cullen; she often found herself praying he would.

Another crash of thunder stole any reply she might have made and Cari tried hard not to view the weather as a portent. The last place Essa needed to be was Halamshiral. They all knew it. Even the weather knew it.

But as worried as she was about Essa’s arrival, she was equally terrified that she might be delayed. 

“I am not so delicate.” Cari wanted to snatch back the words, but they had already flown into the room between them, accusation ringing like poorly struck brass.

Cullen smiled then, and that he let the expression slip was testament to how much their time at the Winter Palace was already wearing on him. Even still, the curve of his lips was so fleeting Cari might have missed it in the dim candlelight had a sheet of lightning not struck the windows behind him. The sudden radiance blinded them both and burned the impression of his face into Cari’s gaze. His eyes were flat, hard and brittle like chips of amber, and the tilt of his lips was a cold, cruel shadow against so much light.

“Who said you were delicate?” he asked, voice pitched just above the onslaught of the storm.

Even if she couldn’t see the consequences, Cari knew when someone was setting a trap.  She shook her head, refusing to answer. Could only hope the negative wasn’t an answer in itself.

Cullen responded to her retreat with a shrug. “Use it.”

“Excuse me?” Cari blinked at the order.  

“Whatever they think of you, use it. You are not delicate, but certainly you can see the advantage to being seen that way. So use it.”

With a shock of fulgurate realization Cari understood that Cullen was not as careful with her as she had initially thought.

“Do you manage Essa this well?” she asked sharply, mentally sifting through a dozen discarded suspicions in a hasty reassessment of the Inquisition’s commander.

She was not often wrong about a person, but she had missed his subtlety. The man was every bit as dangerous as Cari had hoped.

“No one manages Essa.” Cullen chuckled. “Not even a storm such as this. She’s fine. She’ll be here soon.”

Cari envied his faith, but she accepted the offering of it gratefully. She turned back to the window, watched water run in a torrent over the heavy leaded glass obscuring any hope of visibility until daybreak.

“You don’t have to wait with me,” she said as she resumed her impotent vigil.

“I know.”


	5. One Shot: Rain On a Summerday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously written (now in proper chronology!) one shot. Fluffy, NSFW. First person, Essa's pov. ALL THE TROPES! :D

Summerday was almost gone. The longest day had yielded wildly to twilight, the sky darkened by heavy clouds, swirling mist, and a thunderstorm that sent happy couples and celebrants scurrying for cover. Love and lust were as heady in the heavy air as the scents of rose and honeysuckle that wafted from the drenched garden. Lovers were tucked into alcoves, soft laughter and yearning sighs tangling with the music that had filled the keep since sunrise. I hadn’t realized we had so many musicians among us. The lilt of pipes wound through the coming dusk like dream music.

Fin sat on the steps that led into the main keep, a zither across his knees, plucking out a cheery melody with no regard for the weather.

“You’re going to drown,” I told him.

He simply grinned, fingers skipping a spritely tune across the strings to rebuffed my avowal.

When I woke this morning, I thought a traveling festival had descended on Skyhold, but the troops of musicians, comics, and actors were all familiar faces. The rain was chasing us all indoors, but Solas was confident the storm would pass for the night’s merriments. 

Despite my “rustic charm,” Josephine had assured me that Skyhold had turned out revelry grand enough to rival the Winter Palace. She was probably still pouting that I had not let her dress me in sumptuous fashion. I had worried that our friendship would suffer for my staunch refusal to host a ball for whatever nobles Josie could talk into spending the holiday with us. Summerday was for Skyhold, I had told her. The men and women of our stronghold worked hard, day in and day out to keep the Inquisition running. They would have a day and night of joy and laughter. And as much of a day of rest on the morrow as we could manage. We were marching on Adamant on the third day and there was too much looming before us to not take the respite for every last soldier, maid, and stablehand. She was lucky that I was allowing any outsiders within our walls.

I had checked my tea for poison for a week after our disagreement. Until Leliana laughed and promised me that if Josie ever had true cause to have me eliminated that she would slip the knife between my ribs herself, make it quick and clean. I thanked her. Always nice to have a spymaster I could trust.

“You should get out of the rain,” Cullen said, drawing me from my thoughts as he met me on the stairs.

I had been standing with my face turned up to the deluge. Like fowl too daft to know better, I marveled at the weather, losing precious breath to raindrops. Before I could reply, the heavy rainfall suddenly doubled and I heard Fin’s music stop, then the slap of his feet on the stone as he rushed for shelter.

“A little late for that,” I said smiling as Cullen stepped closer to hear me over the roar.

The rain afforded a strange sort of privacy, the water pouring down like noisy grey curtains, cutting us off from a fortress filled with people who really weren’t that interested in us anyway. For one fraught breath, I felt more alone with him than I ever had. There was little between us; he had exchanged his armor for more casual dress, the soft cotton tunic and breeches had a rakish cut, and the wide square collar of his fawn-colored shirt summoned images of warmer climates and high seas. It was unexpected.

And I had been staring at his collarbones all blighted day.

“I want you to know,” Cullen said, reaching slowly to catch my elbows with his hands. “That I am rather admirably refusing to mention that you are standing in the middle of Skyhold in a very wet, very transparent linen dress.”

His gaze fixed resolutely upon my face and I held back a laugh.

“If you hadn’t felt the need to tell me that,” I said, leaning toward him so that the heat from my body could take away some of the rain’s chill. “I might have given you credit for it.”

His fingers flexed against my bare arms, thumbs skidding across my wet skin to press gently against the inside of my elbows. Our pulses joined, pounding in tandem. I drew a slow breath in through my nose. Sought a measure of calm.

“I’ve been ogling,” I admitted with a grin. “Your clothes aren’t much better.”

His feet shifted, and I watched his neck flush, but pragmatism won the day and Cullen mostly ignored me.

“I would very much like to kiss you,” he said instead, surprising me. “Here in the rain, like one of Cassandra’s novels.”

We no longer asked permission for kisses. It was progress on both of our sides that we could be so easy with that affection. Still, this was a considerably more public display than hiding in a corner of the battlements and stealing kisses like two youths.

“That’s a pretty open declaration, Commander,” I warned. “You certain about that?”

He pretended to think about it, and my grin grew ever broader as he feigned an expression of solemn contemplation.

“Curly, if you don’t kiss her,” Varric’s voice was impatient, and close enough that we both startled.

Cullen and I peered through the rain at the darker grey silhouette ahead of us on the stairs.

“I swear,” Varric threatened. “That I will write that you did.”

Cullen chuckled. The sound reverberated between us, warming my chest and stealing my breath.

“If I’m going to take the blame…”

He leaned down, lips hovering cool and sweet over mine.

“Close your eyes, Varric!” I tried to call, but my order and my laughter were muffled by Cullen’s mouth.

I forgot about Varric. I forgot about a lot of things that I was supposed to remember as Cullen’s lips teased mine. Like keeping part of my mind clear and calm, like thinking cool, soothing thoughts. Caution fell away. There remained only the joining of our mouths, the sighs of breath, the slide of tongues, and the aching inches he remembered to keep between our bodies for both our sakes.

Go slowly, I reminded myself in the last rational corner of my mind.

Cullen was better about that than I was. His lips traveled in unhurried exploration, the only indication of the urgency that built between us was his grip on my arms and my tightly balled fists. He knew the danger—we both did—but there was a certain comfort in knowing that he wanted me just as much as I wanted him. My lips lingered, tasting honeyed wine and Cullen and rain.

“Al’right, kids, that’s enough.”

Varric’s drawl managed to grab my attention, but only because he was standing closer to us than before. Reluctantly, Cullen and I drew apart.

“You two manage to make careful and proper look nothing like themselves,” Varric said with a sigh that didn’t quite hide his amusement. “Now get inside before no one needs my not inconsiderable imagination to picture the two of you naked.”

It was my turn to blush. Cullen released my arms and I folded them across my chest.

“I have towels,” I said as if it were the least inane statement I could make and not my ridiculous way of inviting him to my quarters.

“Towels would be good,” Cullen replied.

I heard Varric’s exasperated snort. Kissing we could handle, if he needed the muse, but we were both abysmal at flirting. I turned and ran inside without another word.  I didn’t look to see who was watching as I beat feet to my quarters, but when Josie called to Cullen, diverting him from following me, I wanted to stop and glare at her.

“Inquisitor,” she called as I ran by. “Your dress for the evening festivities is in your bathing chamber.”

I rolled my eyes. “Thank you, Ambassador Montilyet. When you’re through with the Commander, would you send him to me, please?”

I could feel her cringe at my lack of subtlety, but Cullen’s chuckle took away the sting.

“I’ll be along in a moment, Inquisitor.”

His voice was warm, and the familiar way he said my title made it into something of an endearment. Josie sighed at him, but I heard a laugh in the exhalation that she didn’t quite hide.

“Good,” I said, still too high on the day’s revelry to care about decorum.  Lately, I tried–I really did–but that restraint was not in my nature.

I continued to my rooms, clambering up the stairs in a slap of wet linen, and staunchly refusing to look into any reflective surfaces lest I see just how close to naked I actually was in my not-very-thick, too-pale dress. It wasn’t quite the whisper of fabric that was the first gown Josie had given me, but it wasn’t much better. I had no doubt that my breast band and smalls would be clearly visible through the wet fabric.

I had been asked to bless no fewer than seven marriages. Josie had heard “wedding!” and promptly begun planning bonding ceremonies fit for nobility. The couples—definitely not nobility—had taken her enthusiasm in a stride that humbled me. Skyhold’s people loved their lady ambassador. They made me feel guilty enough that I told Josie she could dress me.

I didn’t feel so guilty, however, not to include a list of stipulations for my attire and by the time she finished reading the list, I thought maybe my reward for her understanding was more punishment than either of us deserved.

“I shall take these under consideration, Inquisitor,” Josie had promised with her unfailing politeness.

And she had. My day dress had been something close to what I would have picked out for myself.  I peeled out of the soft grey fabric and my wet underthings, and hung them all near the fireplace to dry.

I reached for a tendril of my magic, letting my body warm to a low smolder that dried my hair and skin and burned off a little of the extra fire Cullen had stirred within me. My skin cooled somewhat. We were doing alright, I thought. Taking things slow, being careful. I was…centered, I told myself, believing it.

I stepped into the dressing room and immediately lost that center. I stared at the gown that hung from a hook on the outside of my wardrobe and groaned. I had underestimated Josephine Montilyet. I would not make the mistake again.

It wasn’t that bad. The dress was in an old Free Marcher style. Something I remembered seeing in my childhood books of fairy tales. There were two layers. A long under dress of silvery grey silk, with a long-sleeved outer cotte that laced over it. The over-dress was linen and split high on each side, the ridiculously long, flowing sleeves were slashed to fall away from my arms. There was embroidery around the neckline of the over-dress, and when I realized that a fine hand had worked silver mabari into the cobalt linen, I forgave Josie everything.

I stared into the mirror warily. The woman who gazed back looked younger than I remembered. Her eyes were too wide, but her breathing was steady. She displayed none of the wildness I feared.

“You’re fine,” I said, and for a moment it was as if my reflection had given the encouraging words to me. “He is safe with you. You’re safe with him.”

“Es?”

I turned guiltily from the mirror.  I didn’t think about the fact that I was standing naked in my dressing room, but seeing Cullen in the doorway, his wet clothes clinging to every plane and angle of his body…well that was impossible to ignore. I had taken two steps toward him before I caught myself, my hands reaching greedily for him.

I dropped them quickly, an apology already on my lips. His smile was delicate, a fledgling thing, but he shook his head at my retreat.

“You can have as much of me as you want,” he said quietly, then amended. “As much as you can at least.”

We had spent many nights discussing the shadows that haunted our pasts, and there had been just as many spent discussing strategies for moving beyond them. What boundaries we each needed. What we wanted. I was having a difficult time remembering them. My hands trembled, and I quickly folded my arms, tucking my traitorous fingers beneath them. Cullen’s eyes tracked my every movement, sweeping over my breasts without apology.

“I want to touch you,” I said roughly, the assertion a challenge.

“Then touch me,” he entreated.

It wasn’t that simple, but I knew how much we wanted it to be, even if only for a few moments. I closed the distance between us too quickly, my chest smacking into his. Cullen caught me, but his hands weren’t as careful as they had been. They gripped my hips, holding me tightly against him. Our hearts beat once, then twice against each other.

“Is this alright?” he asked, voice a low rumble.

I nodded. “Better to ask forgiveness this time,” I said. “Not permission.”

And then I stretched up on my toes and licked his lips. His eyes brightened, honey warmed by summer sun, and his fingers bit into my skin. I groaned against his mouth, wrapped my arms around him and tugged the hem of his wet shirt from the back of his breeches. The contrast of sensations sundered my thoughts.  My hand wandered beneath damp cotton, fingers splaying across taut muscle and cool, smooth skin. He bore more scars than I did; I knew each of them. I learned them again as I sucked his tongue into my mouth.

The bed, I thought, as his hands skimmed up my back spreading fires with the cool, rough pads of his fingertips. It was too far away. Five steps? Surely we could make five steps. I used my body to push him out of the doorway and back toward the bed. His legs hit the edge of the mattress and he sat down so abruptly that we laughed into our kiss, teeth clanking.

I pushed him back a little, climbing onto the bed so that I straddled his legs. I heard his breath hitch and paused, body thrumming as I waited for him to call a stop.

“Look at me,” he ordered softly.

I hadn’t realized that my eyes were closed. I dragged heavy lids up, and the reverence on his face stole my breath.

“How far is too far?” I asked, sliding down so that our bodies aligned too perfectly.

We both groaned, and he pushed back against me, cool and hard and denied to me only by two thin layers of cloth. He placed a biting kiss on my neck, lips and teeth traveling down to my breasts with a thin layer of restraint that I wanted to stretch past reason.  Cullen’s hands tangled in my hair as our lips sought each other again. All I could think of was getting him out of his wet clothes and into me. I needed his blighted shirt off. Now. I broke the kiss, pulled the cotton over his head, scattering water from his curls.

Our chests touched, skin finally to skin, and I groaned, trailing kisses down his neck, nipping at the beautiful slashes of his collarbones, all the while our hips shifted, bodies yearning. I wanted things from him that I couldn’t have. Not yet. Reason nagged at my passion-fogged brain, and I wondered what was the point of no return?

“There’s never a point of no return, Es,” he said with gentle severity.

“What?” I lifted my lips from his skin and stared down him. Had I said the words aloud?

“I want you,” he added, as if we both needed the confirmation. “But—“

He shrugged helplessly. “If neither of us can stop when the other needs us to, then we aren’t ready for each other.”

I smiled and bent to kiss him. A cooler peck. Gratitude and promise.

“We should probably stop,” I admitted grudgingly.

My body screamed at me, but I ignored it.

“Then we stop,” he said, sounding no calmer than I felt.

He shifted so that I fell onto the bed beside him. We lay there, hearts pounding, listening to the rain pattering against the windows, drumming on the roof. Cullen grabbed my hand, laced our fingers together.

“No new scars,” he said, reminding me of our promise to each other.

“No new scars,” I said struggling to catch my breath. “We already carry too many.”

He lifted my hand to his lips and placed a soft kiss there.

“Now, let’s see this dress Josie got you.”

 


	6. Honorable Intentions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter three! Tw: burning mentions, blood, grief. nightmares.

 

 

“Es?”

Cullen’s voice was a sleepy rumble as it broke through the wall of her dreams. Essa started to roll toward him, as she had for dozens of mornings now, but the gentle pressure of his hand on her back stilled her.

“Good morning.” She mumbled the words into the floorboards, stretched slumber from her limbs, and arched up into the kneading sweep of his fingers. Essa groaned in encouragement and was rewarded with the hard sweeping arc of his thumb across the small of her back. She might not get sore from sleeping on the floor, but she wasn’t going to turn down the easy affection that had managed to grow between them during the longest weeks she had faced since Cassandra threw her book at on the table in Haven. Cullen’s fingers dug into the tension she had begun to carry at the base of her spine and Essa’s groan rolled into a moan that she quickly smothered against her arm.

“Good morning,” Cullen chuckled softly. “Are you going to stay down there?”

His touch gentled and she rolled over slowly beneath his hand. His fingers trailed her rotation, rucking up worn linen as they skimmed the curve of her waist before coming to rest beneath the fabric of his tunic. Her stomach clenched beneath the cool touch and Essa’s breath shuddered out, goosebumps answering the familiar caress as she opened her eyes to the black pearling sky.

“I’m not certain,” she admitted.

Her voice was thick and they were still learning when to heed that warning and when to push beyond caution. Some mornings she could climb up into the bed with him, the threat of passion insufficient to chase them from the comfort of one another arms. Some mornings, she needed air and space.

And a cold bath.

“Nightmares?” Cullen asked.

“No.” Not since Cole wound their nightmare together. Not since Solas left Skyhold to search for answers to questions he wouldn’t share. “Just dreams. Light?”

“If you wish.”

It was the same conversation they had every morning that they were lucky enough to share. Essa waved one hand up toward the candle on the bedside table, the gesture—as always—more for his benefit than from necessity. Light pooled in a tawny arc and she glanced up, followed shadows and candlelight to where he lay on the bed above her.

Cullen smiled down at her from the edge of the mattress, head pillowed on one arm, the other hanging over the side of the bed to touch her. The first time she had fallen asleep on the floor in his room had been an accident—the last few moments before rest were too often all they could steal together—but they had discovered a gift of solitude in the morning that followed. Amid the many intimacies that they denied themselves, those quiet waking moments had proven too precious; now when she was at Skyhold, Essa spent more nights in the command tower’s loft than anywhere else.

But that didn’t make anything between them easy.

“The same,” Cullen answered her unspoken question with a lazy stroke, fingers curling against her.

Essa reached for his hand, dragged the maddening touch away with a little gasp as her dreams came rushing back. Fire brushed like watercolors across her skin and Essa’s heart stalled amid the tight effervescence in her chest. Her skin warmed, body flushing as desire spiraled higher from touch both dreamed and remembered.

“Very, very vivid dreams.” She scrambled to her feet, knocking his hand away in her haste. “I should go.”

“Essa.” She was halfway to the ladder before he called after her, exasperated laughter gilding her name. “Wait.”

“I can’t.” She shook her heard sharply, not daring to glance back in her retreat. She knew what she would see. Cullen, curls in golden disarray, new sleep pants rumpled, Diar’s pendant a silver shadow against fair skin and a tapestry of scars, paler, darker, and puckered rose. “I need—“

His hand was on her arm and before she could curse him for his quickness, or tense or step away, Cullen spun her, held her just close enough to claim her lips in a kiss that she knew not to take. Essa snarled at him and he kissed the angry lift of her upper lip, a soft smirk warming his eyes with crinkling corners.

Essa jerked away and was surprised when his equable expression didn’t waver.

“I said ‘no’,” she said furiously, chest now tight for different reasons.

“You didn’t.” He didn’t reach for her again. Cullen folded his arms across his chest and Essa stared helplessly at the play of muscle. “You said you can’t, which isn’t true.”

She blinked, jolted back to her senses by the observation so calmly made. “What?”

She had lost count of the number of times that she had called him out for casual deflection or answers too succinct to be fully honest. They braved one another’s demons, he in her name and she in his, and mostly for the good, but there was always the chance that one of them would push too far or in the wrong direction. She wasn’t sure which this morning was.

“What do you need?” Cullen asked so earnestly that she wanted to lash out at both of them.

“Too much,” Essa muttered, putting another step between them and hoping the rejection would grant her more than physical distance. “You can’t test me this morning.”

Cullen’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully in the dim persistence of light. He nodded once. “Your words are beginning to tell on you,” he informed her in the same tone he often used to advise her on her chess strategy.

“Well, when you figure out what they’re saying,” Essa snapped. “You let me know.”

She shoved her feet into her boots, boots that he had given her eight months ago when the Inquisition was still recovering from the loss of Haven. Now, they were about to march across Orlais to lay siege upon a grey warden stronghold.

“It’s too much,” she said suddenly. “Isn’t it?”

He didn’t ask what she meant. “I could do with fewer demons,” Cullen replied conversationally. “Perhaps a more definitive means of stopping Corypheus than attending a masked ball and launching you at an ancient dark magister and his arch demon dragon…”

He didn’t mention the siege that lay before them,  the Inquisition’s impending march across Orlais, the diplomatic and military convolutions in which her advisors constantly found themselves, but Essa knew. She might pretend toward oblivion, but Cari nor Cullen would have allowed it, even if her conscious had.

Most of the time she was grateful.

“But us?” Cullen dragged her back from her worries, waited until she made reluctant eye contact. He shook his head. “No, it’s not too much. What has you running this morning?”

“We march in two days,” Essa blurted.

In her name. And she could no longer recall the exact number of men and women who were prepared to die with her honorific lifted like praise on bloody lips.

“I am aware.” Cullen’s confirmation was low, voice dragged heavy beneath the weight they both carried.

She jerked her head in acknowledgement of all that he left unspoken.

“I’m edgy,” she admitted between her teeth.

“Yes,” Cullen agreed calmly. “I can see that.”

Essa scowled at him. “And not for any of the right reasons.” She gestured at her body with one hand. “I’m frustrated. Physically.”

She watched realization light his eyes, and as her blush answered his, Essa wondered why her oft-lamented practicality seemed to have completely abandoned her.

“I’m going to talk to Fin,” she announced. “And then I’m going to hit things. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll get Dorian to freeze me a bath.”

Before he could offer a reply, Essa made a dash for the ladder.  

*

_She’s gone. He knew that she would go, but he was supposed to go with her. They had spoken in the early watches of the morning, sharing breakfast and hopes for futures neither had dared to dream. He knew she was in love before she did, knew that one day she would ride off with the Graystones. Maybe she would come back, maybe she wouldn’t. He hoped she wouldn’t. There is nothing for either of them here. Only her father, and Bann Trevelyan travelled more and more of late, tending to duties he’d let go while Essa was too young for him to leave alone. There are the horses, of course, but the most beloved of those would go with them. After the Tourney._

_Fin watches from the sidelines, feet on the bottom rail to give him enough height to see. Bann Trevelyan holds his belt to keep him from pitching forward into the arena and they both cheer, voices raised like a red lion’s roar, as Essa and Diar slam swords and shields against each other in furious contest. They have fought to a standstill, and Fin isn’t sure how much longer they can continue._

_“Marry me, Diarmont Stanhope!” Essa’s laugh is contagious, her face split wide by joy._

_Diar drops his shield, rips his helmet off. She has already disarmed him and the love that shines in his eyes is everything Fin knows she deserves._

_“Is that a yes?” Someone shouts. It had better be, Fin thinks, waiting with bated breath along with everyone else for Essa’s love to answer her._

_“If she’s fool enough to want me,” Dair replies. “Then I am smart enough to have her.”_

_He pulls her close in clatter of armor and Fin knows he should look away, make the usual faces of disgust that boys his age are supposed to, but he has never lied to Essa, not even when she caught him stealing pies from the kitchen, not even when she asked him where the bruises on his arms and back came from. So he won’t lie now. He watches Diar kiss Essa beneath a clear blue sky like some prince in a fairy tale, watches her kiss him back, tears and laughter falling with every press of her lips and his. Fin dares to hope that she has found a brighter light in her life than what meager brightness he and her father have given her._

_He’s in the crowd, jostled to the front and held above the rest by one of Diar’s company. He never remembers who, just broad shoulders and a precarious but appreciated perch. There are vows and then there’s revelry. Essa drops an exuberant kiss on his cheek._

_“Tomorrow,” she promises laughing as Diar drags her away from the throng of their well-wishers._

_“Tomorrow,” Fin echoes, wraps his arms around her in a brief but fierce hug. Diar shakes his hand and the two of them smile down at him. He clings for just a moment, recognizing them for what they are._

_A family, a home. Freedom._

_Tomorrow shines like a new frontier, but the glow on the horizon is not the dawn. It is not the sun shining with hope. There is only a wall of flames and Essa is gone. Fin is a child no longer. He searches for time unending, wandering through an inferno, eyes burning, lungs choking on black smoke and lost dreams long turned to ash. He calls for her, and somewhere distant, too faint for him to dare believe that the sound is any more than a fool’s hopeless imaginings, he hears her call back. A broken, sobbing cry that will never be Essa._

_He runs toward the sound, even knowing it can’t be real. He is helpless to remain behind. Never again, he gave the Maker his vow when he found her at Haven._

_The flames are reaching higher. They are Fin’s whole world. All that remains is the razed ground beneath his blistered feet, the tears in eyes gone blind. The tower rises up, a fortress of flame and stone and death. There are bones trapped in the mortar; his fingers sink into the gaping holes of a broken skull and Fin stares blearily at the grey chips of bone embedded in his broken palm._

_“Fin!”_

_She is trapped somewhere above him. She needs saving. And isn’t that the greatest lie the Fade ever told? But Fin is desperate to reach her. He climbs until his hands and feet are bloody, shouts until her name is nothing but hoarse silence. He can’t look back, can’t look down to see how little progress he has made. He must only continue. Until there is Essa._

_Or he is gone._

“Fin!” Essa’s hands were rough on his shoulders and Fin was so grateful to hear the strength of her voice that he almost missed the edge of panic in his name as she shook him. “By the Mabari, Fin Larkson. Wake up!”

Fin opened his eyes slowly, half expecting smoke’s sharp occlusion. The nightmare lingered thick and acrid, a bitter reminder of when he had lost her. Essa hovered over him, face pinched with worried shadows and Fin reached for her, drew her down into his arms with a sigh that she echoed.

“I’m alright.” He murmured the assurance against her tangled hair, but he knew that she could feel his still-pounding heart.

“First one for you?” she asked, tucking close to him in his narrow bed.

He was lucky to have his own room, a necessary convenience, Lady Montilyet insisted, not a display of favoritism. Most days he believed her, especially when Essa came looking for him before dawn. It wouldn’t have done for the Inquisitor to be lurking in the barracks at odd hours.

“Yes.” Fin sat up and she shifted beside him, wrapping both arms around his waist. “But I don’t believe it was your ‘friend’. I’ve had this dream before.”

He sighed. “Too many times to count.”

“Tell me.”

Fin shook his head. “It’s a story you well know.” He tugged the blankets from between them and climbed over her to leave the bed. “I—“

He took a deep breath. “I know that yours is the greater sorrow, but losing you that day…that was the worst day of my life.”

He had never told her what her magic had cost him, but he knew that she understood. Fin turned to the window, stared out at the blushing sky.

“I know,” Essa whispered. “Until Haven…I thought you hated me. You had every right to.”

“WHAT?”

He turned quickly back to face her. She was sitting up against his headboard, arms wrapped around his pillow. Her dark hair was a mess and one pale shoulder stuck out of the over-sized tunic she wore. Her neck and face were sun-dark. The same color as the freckles across her collarbone.  He didn’t know the map of constellations of her skin, nor did he want to, but Fin knew what she was remembering when she fidgeted with her collar, knew that when she ran her fingers along the crease of her wrists that she was lamenting wounds that hadn’t scarred. Knew that the crooked line of her nose was her second most treasured gift from her dead husband.

And he knew the most precious.

“Hated you?” he demanded. “By the Mabari! Why would you think that?”

She stared through the waxing light, gaze sliding past him. “You never wrote me back,” she shrugged, and he knew that she had accepted the heartache long before now.

“Wrote you back?” Fin frowned. “You wrote to me?”

Essa nodded. “Not the first year of course, but once I came back to Ostwick, I wrote to you. Tried to explain, to ask your forgiveness.”

Years of heartbreak bubbled up at her words, until Fin thought he would choke on the grief and rage of the abandoned child he hadn’t been.

“I never saw any letters,” he said, quiet in his rage.

Her breath hissed in through her nose and suddenly Essa was on her feet. “I will kill her,” she muttered and Fin knew who she blamed. He doubted she was wrong.

“Essa,” he called her back as she reached the door. “Let it go.”

“I can’t,” the admission quavered on the edges and though it was now the greatest of her concerns, he knew that the revelation was not all that troubled her. Something else had driven her to his room this morning.

“You have to,” he ordered gently. “This is just another way she failed. I never believed you left me willingly, and I never needed an apology. I only hate that you thought I didn’t understand.”

“Understand?” There were tears in her eyes when she turned to face him. “How could I expect you to understand, Fin. You were ten years old and I left you.”

He walked toward her slowly, hands raised at waist height so that she could see them, every intention communicated clearly before he touched her.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered as he pulled her back into his arms.

“Me too.” He dropped a kiss on top of her head, still marveling that she fit beneath his chin. “But these are wounds that healed years ago, yes?”

“Yes,” she mumbled, arms wrapping tightly around his waist. She drew a slow breath, let it out in a steadying huff.

“Now, tell me what brought you here in the wee hours of the morning,” Fin ordered, summoning a smile for both their sakes. “Wearing the Commander’s shirt, no less. Did he do something I need to punch him for? Because I will you know. Right in his pretty face.”

She was laughing as she looked up at him and Fin grinned. Her body relaxed and he held back a sigh of relief.

“I’m serious!” he insisted.

“I know!” she giggled. “And Maker knows, I am grateful for you, Fin Larkson.”

She pecked a kiss against the thick cotton that lay over his heart. “You’re going to have to tell me about your dream,” she warned. “You nearly scared me to death.”

Fin sighed. “And you’re going to have to tell me what you’re running from,” he countered. “Breakfast on the ramparts?”

“Yes, ser.”

“Go get food. I’ll meet you there.”

*

Fin liked to think of himself as a practical sort. In addition to understanding Essa’s more…obscure thought patterns…he was often lauded for possessing pragmatism beyond his years. Even Harritt didn’t mind his company and if the grumbling head blacksmith trusted him enough to leave him in charge of the undercroft—Dagna, they all knew Harritt meant Dagna—while Harritt was overseeing work down in Cullen’s staging camp, well that was also to Fin’s credit. Most folks forgot Fin was a decade Essa’s junior, and most days he didn’t suppose he could blame them.

Today was not one of those days.

He couldn’t remember the last impulsive thing he had done, nor when he had lost his temper. He may have had his mother’s red hair, but he had not inherited the barely leashed fury that his father had claimed went along with it. This evening, however, he was taking after at least one of the volatile women who had influenced his formative years; he could only hope he had more of Essa’s temper than that of the woman who named him. He would have to see.

The old nightmare had worn on him, somehow more powerful than the last time it had visited him. Waking to find Essa safe in his room had gone a long way toward soothing frazzled nerves, but he’d also upset her.  Dragged sharp edges against old wounds reopened by her sister’s presence. Breakfast hadn’t helped. She might have felt better by the time they were done talking, but Fin had been—perhaps unreasonably—angry, and spending all day at the forge had done nothing to cool his ire.  

They had all been pulling double duty in preparation for tomorrow’s departure, but Fin had been irate when Essa left his room that morning, and he was still fuming twelve long hours later. He had worked without ceasing, hands and back kept busy, hoping he’d sweat out his annoyance, but there was nothing to be done for it. He had worked himself to near exhaustion, should have been too tired for the continued simmering anger. And yet here he was, still at the end of his not inconsiderable patience.

It was time someone had a talk with Cullen.

There was a cool summer breeze as Fin stalked across the yards, still in his sooty leathers, goggles thrust up into his hair. He vaguely noticed a few called greetings, couldn’t remember if he answered them or simply continued his determined trek to the command tower. The moons were already high, but he knew that Cullen was sleeping, just as he knew that Essa wouldn’t be there tonight. He knew too damn much about their love life, and as of this morning, he knew more than Cullen did.

That had to stop.

Fin nodded once to the startled guard at the door. He didn’t know what the man saw, but it obviously wasn’t Fin’s usual calm demeanor. He almost laughed as he pushed into the tower and closed the door none-too-quietly behind him.

“She’s not here.”

Cullen didn’t look up from his desk and somehow that affront was more than Fin could stomach. He folded his arms across his chest and took a deep breath and two heavy strides toward the desk. The words that he shouted were not exactly what he was expecting to leave his mouth.

“Love is not a three way street, Rutherford!” Cullen glanced up sharply, the lines around his eyes smoothing as his gaze rounded in surprise. Fin found himself hiding a smirk.

“Now that I have your attention,” he continued. “We need to talk.”

 


	7. Magefire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fin and Cullen have a sex talk. Then Cullen and Essa have a sex talk. Adorable fluff ensues.
> 
> Oh, the fluff. I will not apologize for the fluff. for one thing it's adorable. For another, we have a whole lot of not fluff on the horizon.

Cullen snapped his gaping mouth shut and stared across his office at Fin. The smith had started out as Essa’s stable boy and his first loyalty was not in question, but Cullen liked to believe they had become friends during the first winter at Skyhold when she was away. Tonight, Fin did not look friendly. Cullen watched as he crossed his arms, broad shoulders and working muscles visible even beneath the heavy singed leather of his jacket.

“Now that I have your attention,” Fin continued, all flint and steel, his rebuke as sharp as any commanding officer Cullen had ever served. “We need to talk.”

Had he been anyone else, Cullen would have reminded Fin that he was busy planning a march across Orlais followed by the siege of a fortress he himself had not seen.  But Fin was not one to borrow troubles from an uncertain future, and he had never stormed into Cullen’s office smelling of charred metal and covered in soot. A knot of dread tangled in Cullen’s stomach.

“I’m listening.” He stepped away from his desk  so that Fin would know he had his full attention. “Would you like something to drink?”

It would keep his hands busy, he thought, and Fin looked like he needed one, which in itself was a matter of considerable concern.

“I imagine we both will before we’re done.” Fin reached up to scrub one hand through sweaty hair. It stuck up in rough red spikes around his goggles. His hand caught on the glass and he yanked them from his head, seemed to remember then that he was still in most of his gear. “Do you mind?”

He gestured toward an empty armor stand.

“Not at all,” Cullen replied shocked by his own civility when all he really wanted to do was command Fin to tell him what in the Maker’s name had driven him to his door.

“Thank you.” Fin’s eyes were too bright, a wild shimmer of blue that reminded Cullen of the sparks Essa feared in her own. Cullen had never seen him so upset, not even after Haven when the rest of them had been uncertain of Essa’s recovery.

“If I weren’t so angry with you,” Fin announced calmly and with a candor that Cullen suspected he had acquired from Essa. “I would apologize for the discomfort I’m about to cause you.”

Cullen wondered if Fin might be there to throw a punch at him. In Fin’s shoes he could think of a number of reasons for him to be protective, though Fin didn’t seem the type to fight Essa’s battles for her. Still, he eyed him carefully as Fin pulled off layers of heavy leather, a short-waisted jacket followed by the long apron that protected the fronts of his legs. There as many buckles as any set of armor, and Fin’s body was as scarred and honed from his craft as any warrior’s. He wasn’t looking forward to what might be his due.

“Has she talked to you since this morning?” Fin asked, rolling up the dirty, sweat-damp sleeves of his shirt. The muscles in his forearms flexed lightly with each movement.

“No,” Cullen answered, watching him carefully as he poured them each a cup of water. He held one out to Fin and was relieved when the smith took it. Fin drank it down with a grimace. “She rode down to the valley, said she would be back late and that she had a meeting with Leliana and Josephine.”

Fin held his empty glass out for a refill and Cullen obliged.

“Gonna need something stronger than that,” Fin mused, finishing off the second cup. “So she’s avoiding you?”

“I have a bottle of whiskey somewhere,” Cullen offered, rummaging through his desk drawers. “Why would she be avoiding me?”

The thought had never occurred to him. With all that was going on, they each had more than their usual over-weighted share of burdens. They were meeting up the next morning. Riding out at the head of her army together. That was enough for him.

Cullen found the heavy glass bottle beneath a stack of old reports. It was an expensive single-malt, a gift from some visiting arl, a sipping whiskey that he had intended to appreciate some far-off day when Thedas’s worst threat was politics and looming blights.

“Do you want to tell me what’s on your mind, Fin?” He placed the bottle on a very small, mostly clear spot atop his desk. “You’re starting to make me more nervous than the army waiting for my orders.”

“Sex,” Fin blurted.

“Sex?” He couldn’t have heard him correctly, but if he had, Fin was right, they were going to need hard liquor; Cullen opened the whiskey.

“And Essa,” Fin added miserably, clunking his empty cup onto the desk to await his portion.

Cullen dispensed two generous draughts and tossed his back without waiting for Fin. He poured himself a second and Fin took his with a little lift of gratitude before he sipped.

“Have you noticed she’s a little edgier than usual?” Fin asked without looking at him.

It was the exact word Essa had used when she fled his room that morning. Edgy. As if Cullen didn’t know what she meant. As if he didn’t share the same frustrated sentiment. Cullen nodded slowly.

“Let me guess, she would rather talk to you about it than me.” It was impossible to keep the bitterness from his voice. He didn’t often begrudge Fin his closeness with Essa, but there were times when he couldn’t help feeling as if he could not be enough for her.

Fin scowled at him. “Really?” he snapped. “You want to do  _this_  now?”

“No.” Cullen rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “I don’t. I’m sorry.  Please continue. “

Fin nodded once, the movement short and jerky as he glared down into his cup.

“You and Essa have had a lot of the right conversations,” he began, and Cullen was lulled into taking the concession as a compliment. “But you haven’t had this one, and you should.”

Fin turned paced around the desk to one of the narrow windows, staring out at the dark as he sipped his drink.

“Which one?” Cullen was running out of patience. He had enough worries and if he let himself step away from them for too long, the magnitude of his responsibilities loomed larger than their not insignificant reality.

“Give me a minute, man!” Fin scowled into the space before him. “I am ten years younger than you two, you do remember that don’t you? Do you think this is easy for me? To walk in here and tell you that my mother, sister, best friend is a walking inferno waiting to happen because she hasn’t been able to lay a hand on herself since you kissed her!”

Cullen dropped his cup, the clatter of pewter on stone louder than his gasped shout. “What?”

He knew he was blushing. He grabbed a cleaning rag from the nearest weapon stand and bent to mop up the mess, eyes steadfastly on the spill.

“You heard me,” Fin muttered. “And instead of talking to you, or even Bull, I had to drag that bit of information from her this morning while she was still too warm and as skittish as that blasted Cacique.”

Essa’s warhorse wasn’t exactly skittish, but he was unpredictable. Dangerous. Cullen could appreciate the comparison with the appropriate sense of foreboding.

“But now it’s yours,” Fin continued mercilessly. “Do you understand, Rutherford? This is your doing. Both of you. You fix it before she breaks both your hearts for fear of you.”

He took a large gulp of whiskey and let out a heavy breath.

“Fear of me?” Cullen dared to sputter.

“You together. By the Mabari, man, talk to her, not me.” Fin threw back the rest of his drink, coughed once and headed for the nearest door. “I’ll come back for my gear later.”

Cullen didn’t miss the implied “and you had better not be here.” It was just as well. His desk needed to be packed up and taken down to the camp in fewer hours than he wanted to admit he had. At some point he should at least pretend to get some sleep. He stared down into his cup, swirling the amber liquid against dull silver and debating the merits of false courage. There weren’t enough, Cullen thought with a sigh. He set the cup down on his desk and went to find Essa.

*

“I’ll send the letter as soon as I return.” 

Josephine set her tea on the table between them and paused to make several notes. She would be remaining at Skyhold when they departed for the Western Approach, but there would first be a grand embarkation from the staging camp. 

“Something very official. Perhaps a commendation to House Trevelyan for their service to the Inquisition. First you, then Master Larkson, and now Lady Carilyna. Your family should be proud. A small personal mention of how happy the Inquisitor is to be reunited with those who were so important to her past. Clearly such stalwart hearts are brought together by the Divine.”

Essa smiled, no small amount of meanness in the expression as she bit into a preposterous pink frosted cake. It smelled of lavender, lemon, and rosewater,  “Thank you, Josie, I think that would be perfect. You will see that it is addressed to both of my parents?”

“Of course.” The ambassador’s chin dipped in a small nod.

“Thank you.”

It wouldn’t make up for nearly a decade of believing that Fin hated her, but the news would gnaw at her mother and assuage any concerns her father might have.  Essa wondered if she would ever fully know the sins of Miranda Trevelyan. Then she wondered why she would even want to. The woman had willfully denied comfort to an orphaned child and her own grieving daughter. There was no limit to her callousness.

“Is there anything else you require?”

Leliana’s query was soft with threat, and her relaxed posture on the couch did not disabuse Essa of the death she had seen in the spymaster’s pale eyes. She had not approved of Josie’s more diplomatic retaliation to Essa’s mother’s cruelty, and while Essa could not indulge her suggestions, she had appreciated them. She couldn’t remember how many letters she had sent from the tower before she had given up on ever hearing from Fin, but it had taken years.

Years of her heart breaking, numbing, gathering hope and writing again only to wait for nothing.

“Not now. Thank you, Leliana.” She shook away too dark thoughts and stared around the wide expanse of her quarters. “I’m going to try to get some sleep, I hope you two will do the same.”

“You’re staying here tonight?” Leliana’s astonishment was poorly disguised, the teasing purposeful.

Essa should have laughed. She normally would have, but after waking Fin from his nightmare and sharing their worries over breakfast, she had worked her muscles to aches and her hands to blisters all day in Smoke’s Valley. Upon her late return to Skyhold, she had read reports and projections for the upcoming campaign until her mind was an endless roster of names, needs, and landmarks.

And still her body was a jangling, foreign thing.

“I am.” She managed a wan smile that had Leliana’s eyes narrowing. “I have a cool bath filled with herbs that have probably steeped into a healthy tea, but I plan on soaking until my fingers and toes look like raisins and then sleeping on the balcony.”

“Not naked,” Josie admonished, mock horror finally dragging a genuine laugh from Essa.

“No,” she grinned. “Thanks to you ladies and Cassandra my linen collection has grown nicely.”

She stood from her chair and stretched, arms high above her head, body lifted on her toes. She balanced there, muscles protesting her willful intention.

“Plus the last time I tried, I woke up to Sera attempting a very terrible, very lewd sketch.”

“Which she kindly left on my desk,” Cullen announced, pulling their attention to the stairs.

He had forgotten his usual heavy, deliberate steps. Had nearly snuck up on three of the five women in Thedas that no one wanted to catch off guard. Essa raised a brow in askance and Cullen shrugged. Something more was on his mind tonight. She didn’t suppose she could fault him for it.

“I can bring it to you if you like,” he offered, stepping into the room and hovering outside the small grouping of furniture Josie insisted on calling Essa’s parlor. “It looks nothing like you, though there is a distinct green hue to the rather indecent sketch of your left hand.”

Essa snickered, came slowly down from the apex of her extension.  “By all means, Commander, you may keep it. Tack it up in the barracks if you like. It will be good for moral.”

“Cullen, you mustn’t,” Josie was merrily scandalized and they all laughed, a too rare moment of happiness in a night heavy with preparations for war.

“I won’t,” he promised before she could demand it of him. 

“Thank you,” Josie rose from her chair and began gathering her ever-present paperwork. “I’ll spare you the lecture about the Herald’s reputation.”

Essa snorted with laughter and Josie glared at her. “And that is why.”

“Yes,” Leliana said, flowing to her feet with sharp grace. “It will only entertain her.”

She stopped to drop a kiss on Essa’s cheek. “Get some rest.”

“Yes, my lady spymaster.”

“Your imitation of obedience fools no one,” Leliana told her with a twist of a smile.

“Good night, Inquisitor.”

Essa waved at Josie as the ambassador headed for the stairs. “I know that,” she shrugged. “And I know that you know that, so it’s not really lying, now is it?”

Leliana chuckled, her mirth pale and a little sinister, the first cool breeze before a summer storm. “You would fair better at the game than you know, Inquisitor.”

She took her leave and Essa stared across the parlor at Cullen.

“This is a nice surprise,” she ventured. 

“Is it?” he asked.

His eyes were wary, shadowed. She knew he was tired—how could he not be?—but this was more than fatigue.

“I thought it was,” Essa amended. “Am I wrong?”

He lingered with a chair and the table between them, posture so carefully relaxed that Essa knew it for false. She sat down abruptly, barely catching the edge of the chair she had just vacated.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered, mind racing over a dozen terrible things that might have brought him to her quarters with a gaze that wouldn’t quite meet hers and the moons high in the summer sky. “Cullen?”

“Fin came to see me.” He crossed the small distance between them, strides clipped and still silent as he stepped between the dainty chairs. Essa stared up at him in confusion.

“Is he alright?”

“He’s worried about you,” Cullen’s voice was rough. He started to reach for her then seemed to think better of the impulse. He turned and walked toward her sideboard, poured himself a glass of water before offering her one.

“I’m fine,” Essa said, answering both questions. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Cullen cleared his throat and took another gulp of water. “You tell me.”

He shook his head before she could answer. “No, that’s not how we’re going to do this. We’ve never danced around anything before.”

Essa stared at his back, when he didn’t turn around she hazarded. “No, we don’t. So what’s this all about?”

She watched his shoulders rise beneath a shaky breath. “You all but run from me this morning. Then Fin comes to me tonight, tells me that you’re on edge—which I blighted well know—but that it’s our fault you’re on edge and that you’re avoiding me. “

“I’m going to kill him—“

“He’s worried about you!” Cullen shouted at the wall before him. “And quite frankly so am I.”

He couldn’t hear her laughing. She knew he couldn’t, she could barely gasp enough air to breathe much less make a sound of indication. Essa pounded on the table before her to get his attention.

“Essa?”

He turned back to her and Essa knew she would remember the look of concern on his face for the rest of her life. She had never seen him so utterly and helplessly confounded, and now he thought she was having a fit of some kind. Perfect. 

But she still couldn’t stop laughing, still couldn’t catch her breath.

“You—“ Her face was aching, jaw seizing until she could barely shove the words from beneath her back teeth. “You really—“ she drew in a groaning gasp of air. “Want to have this conversation?”

“Yes,” he answered sullenly. “But not if you’re going to laugh at me.”

“Not—“ She wheezed, was finally able to manage a braying guffaw. “Not at you. At us. At you and poor Fin.”

She wiped tears from her eyes, tried very hard not to giggle as his concern melted into an impressive glower.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not.”

“No, I’m not.” And she was laughing again. “What—what did he say to you?”

“That you aren’t taking care of yourself,” Cullen muttered, dragging one hand through his hair and glancing past her with a soldier’s stalwart mutiny.

Essa snickered. “Those were his words?”

“No,” he uttered shortly.

“So those are  _your_  words?”

“Yes—no,” he broke off in frustration. “This isn’t funny.”

“Oh,” she disagreed, sobering. “It’s a little funny. And considering that you and my best friend are talking about an incredibly private matter, you had better be glad that I’m laughing.”

She nodded toward the couch Leliana had left. “Sit.”

Cullen sat.

“You really want to talk about this?” she asked again. She wasn’t sure that she did. Not with any gravity.

He crossed his arms across his chest. “I think we need to. Don’t you?”

Essa nodded. “Probably. But it’s going to be a lot of stammering, stuttering, and you calling on the Maker.”

He smiled slowly. “We have survived worse before.”

“Alright.” She settled back in her chair, drew her bare feet up to the cushion before her and sat, arms wrapped around her shins, chin on her knees. “Ask your questions.”

“Is Fin right?” He was looking anywhere but at her.

“Yes.” Essa stared at the floor between them with equal devotion.

Cullen sighed. “You told me once that you have—“ He paused for a moment and she waited for him to take a breath and forge ahead. “A great many desires.”

“Frequency,” she specified. “As in, I’m thinking about sex all the time.”

Having it. Not having it. What was wrong with her that she had such powerful desires but rarely actually wanted to let anyone touch her? And that was all without the near constant fear of setting them aflame.

“Fair enough,” Cullen murmured. “And lately?”

“A great many more.” Too many. Most days she thought she would rattle out of her skin for wanting him.

“And yet you haven’t…”

She let him floundered for words, her hands twisting against one another as she stared at him. Cullen sighed and she took pity on both of them.

“I haven’t been comfortable finding my own release,” she stated flatly, lifting her gaze to his. “My body doesn’t just want the climax. It wants you and my mind is all too willingly to spin whatever fantasy my body might crave.”

He flushed and glanced away, but Essa took no satisfaction in the fact that he couldn’t meet her stare.

“I—You must forgive me—“ He cleared his throat and when he spoke again his words rolled over her warm and slow like honey. “I don’t see how this is a problem.”

“Really?” she was surprised. “You don’t mind—“

Essa stumbled over her tongue, mumbled a curse and tried to pick up the ends of the thoughts she had lost. “It feels too much like a secret.”

And Maker knew how she hated secrets. “With everything you’ve been through, Cullen, it feels like I’m taking what I want from you, without any consideration for your wants, your consent…By the Mabari!”

She exploded to her feet too restless with wanting and frustrated by weeks of self-denial. “This sounds stupid. Andraste’s knickers! I understand if you think it’s ridiculous, Cullen, but it’s how I feel. I—“

“Es, give me a minute to catch up,” she glanced back to him and he shook his head. “No, I don’t need a minute. Come here.”

He held out one hand and she eyed him with suspicion.

“If you want me to limp to you,” he said, eyes shining with teasing even as she watched his neck flush rose. “I will.”

“No,” she covered her mouth with her hand, cheeks hot as she mumbled from behind her fingers. “We’re really talking about this?”

Cullen nodded. “And, Maker’s breath, woman!” he smiled slightly after the exclamation. “You have my permission. As long as you’ll forgive me for never thinking to ask yours.”

“You—What?“ Essa turned and nearly charged across the room to him, the humor of her own stuttering words not lost on her. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

She sat beside him and tried very hard not to flinch when he reached for her hand. His thumb swept across her knuckles, well-worn leather a smooth slide across pebbling skin. Essa bit her lip to stop her gasp.

“I don’t think like people, do I?”

Cullen laughed softly. “Sometimes, but no. Definitely not in this.  I don’t believe people generally feel the need to apologize for figments of their imagination.”

Essa sighed. “I can’t explain it.” She had known it wouldn’t make sense to anyone, which was precisely why she had not gone to Bull with her sexual impracticality. He would have only laughed at her, and most of the time she could handle that just fine, but not about this.

“Have you ever had this issue before?”

She was almost proud of him, asking after her health with a detachment nearly worthy of a healer.

“No,” she fidgeted with his fingers. “I’ve never been this…preoccupied by someone before.”

He said nothing, so loudly that she would have burst to her feet again had his hand not tightened on hers.

“It was always just sex.” Essa shrugged, trying to answer the questions he was too uncertain or too polite to ask. “Even my own hands and my own mind, it was just sex.  I didn’t lay there yearning for someone else’s hands. And now that I am, I’m just having a little trouble. I’ll get past it. I just need some time.”

“Alright,” he said surprising her, lifting their entwined hands to his lips to place a kiss on the back of her hand. “Take your time. But tell me when you’re edgy, next time before you feel the need to retreat?”

Essa nodded.  “I can do that.”

He stood up, caught her chin with his other hand and bent to place a swift kiss on her lips.

“Essa?” He didn’t speak again until she looked up into his eyes. “I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about you.”

He stroked her jaw, slowly unlaced their fingers.  “But I can suffer with you, if you’d like. Until you figure this whole thing out.”

He was still bent over her and with her head arced back, she couldn’t remember ever feeling so vulnerable.

“You—you don’t have to do that,” she whispered, feeling a blush burn hotly up her neck and into her face. Still, she couldn’t look away, and as his eyes held hers, she felt stripped bare.

“Then you don’t either,” he countered very deliberately. “There. Permission granted all around.”

He released her then and stole one more lingering kiss. “I’ll be in my bunk,” he murmured against her lips.

Then he gave her a little wink and headed for the stairs.

 


	8. Waiting to Be Broken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Halfway through the march to Adamant, Essa is having nightmares again and struggling with the magnitude of having her own army. 
> 
> A bit NSFW at the end? So…this one shot combines two ficlet/drabbles that were previously written out of chronology (A Bit of Punching and Waiting to Broken with a new nightmare and falls BAM perfectly between Nightmares: chapter four and chapter five (wip). It’s a little angsty, a little smutty, but I’m pretty fond of how it turned out. I also managed to use THREE of the tumblr nightmare prompts in this thing.

 “I thought you needed to hit something.” The laconic taunt rattled the bars on the cage of Essa’s temper. She was tired. Couldn’t remember the last decent night of sleep she had gotten. “You want to dance around, you need to go get Dorian or Josie.”

_They are dancing, a faltering stumbling, impromptu waltz on the headland where he first began training her. His arms feel the same as ever. He’s the same—he always is—but she is not._

Essa snarled, threw another punch that the Iron Bull saw coming; he didn’t even bother turning aside the lackluster blow. He caught her fist, jerked her arm hard enough that she stumbled. She drew back with a glare, shoulder wrenching when he didn’t release her.

“You’re punching from the shoulder,” he reproved heatedly.  “I can see every throw coming, even on my bad side.”

_Ten years have passed since his smile was her beacon. Ten years since she stood on the tourney field, golden slants of sunlight bouncing in blinding glints from polished armor. He still stands with loose-hipped grace, legs bowed like unyielding parentheses. He is still lean and wiry. He will never know the comfort of the well-earned rest of middling years. She might not either for that matter._

Essa pulled back again, and this time Bull let go at the last moment. She would have landed on her ass if Cole hadn’t caught her elbows, steadied her. He gave her a push back toward her antagonist.

“Less remembering,” he offered helpfully, almost cheerfully. “Less talking. More hitting.”

“That you talking, kid, or her?” Bull snorted. “Where are you, Boss?”

Not here. Not where she should be.

_“You have not sought me out for some time.”_

_His voice is not quite the same. It never was, though there were long bitter years when she could not hear the differences through her grief. Now it is filled with reproach and she wonders why she thought this was a good idea._

_“I wanted to see you again. My waking memory is not often so reliable.”_

A lie. If she had any artistic talent, she could have drawn Diarmont from perfect recall, but this was not the face scorched into her memory. This smiling, teasing—living—countenance was not the image that waited for her on the worst nights.

_He smiles and his eyes are rain-soaked green, filled with laughter._

_He is the same, but not._

Essa threw another punch, a better punch, pushing from her elbow, keeping her shoulder down so that it didn’t announce her move. Wrapped knuckles struck hard against Bull’s broad, calloused palm, landing with a sting that traveled up her arm.

“Better,” he grunted. “Again.”

_She has taken that laughter for herself. Distilled from it the truth of him. She wears it like perfume, two small drops warmed by the pulse behind her ears, dispersed by the sudden leaps of her heart’s joy. It has taken time, but she has grown into it over the years. Once a mere fledgling creature, near silent in the tower, jokes shared with his memory, musings whispered into the night above an empty bed. Now her laughter boasts flight feathers, fighting wings._

Essa hit Bull again, and soon picked up an old training pattern. Jab, jab, cross. Jab. Jab. Cross.

_She is not the same. She is stronger, quieter and louder than she was. She has more to fight for and more to lose, and she knows what it is to have lost everything._

“Move your feet, woman.” Bull threw a lazy kick at her, connecting lightly with her ankle and making her sidestep. “What the hell is wrong with you tonight?”

It was a rhetorical question, not that Cole was any good with those. “Helpless,” he said. “Too many nightmares. So much fire. Monsters and memory on the outside of the cage.”

“Those feelings aren’t for sharing, Cole,” Essa bit out, lifting her heels a breath above the ground, lightening the load on her feet and loosening her hips into something useful.

_“I have to let you go,” she tells him. “I loved you, but–” The words are past tense, faded and negligent, an observation made too far beyond the moment of revelation._

_He answers her with anger. Face drawn into shadows of hate that she could never imagine Diar harboring. He grabs her arm and the anchor flares, crimson and gold and azure, fire not fade stuff.  Her skin melts from the bone, muscles stretching and snapping beneath the heat before they slide away, leaving ash and bone that soon crumbles._

“You’re not angry with me,” Cole replied in his easy, unruffled tone.

“No,” Essa agreed, hurling another punch at Bull.

_She would scream if it were not a nightmare she has had a hundred times before._

_“I want you to hurt.” His confession is a new torment. He grabs her remaining arm, holds fast until there is nothing but a raging inferno around them. His face contorts in soundless agony, a distortion of him that she has seen before. Too many times. It is the face she remembers best and the death mask is perfect as his voice drifts to her from far away. “I want you to hurt like I do.”_

“Stop swinging at the waist,” Bull sighed, breaking through her persistent remembering.

Essa corrected her form. She was better than this and they both knew it, but she couldn’t focus past her turmoil. It had gotten so bad that Cacique was pissed with her; the temperamental warhorse made her miss Geri even more, but there was no time for comfort now. There was only the march. The impending siege. The rapid return of her nightmares was just another reason on the long list she had for being much more than just angry. She was a bundle of uncertainty, body humming with too many fears and worries, a song she thought she had long forgotten. The Inquisition’s forces were halfway through the four week march to Adamant Fortress and Essa had never felt so helpless and lost in all of her life.

“You talked to Cullen?” Bull asked gruffly as she finally landed a punch he couldn’t criticize.

_Essa lifts her face to the flames, awaits the fire like spattering rain and renewal. She was born in darkness. Her first memories are of inescapable blankness, but she was forged of this. It will not break her. Not now._

_“I will never hurt like you do.”_

“No.” Essa took a quick step back, one to the side, nearly landed a jab to his ribs.

It was done. The morning almost gone, and she owed Bull and Cole a debt greater than they knew for helping her throw off the lingering chains of the nightmare.

“I thought that was what you two did,” Bull said, sliding from his holding stance to one more dangerous. If she wanted to spar, he would oblige her. “Talk that is.”

The dream was broken, but that didn’t mean she was free, didn’t mean there wasn’t another day, another demon waiting, another man waiting to die for love of her. She had an army full of them, men and women, elves, dwarves, and humans, all willing to lay down their lives for Andraste’s Herald.

“I’m not,” she punched out with breathless fury. “In a talking mood!”

Bull blocked her strike with one massive forearm, turning the force of her fist away and watching impassively as Essa scrambled to correct her footwork.  She was already sweating; she knew better than to fight angry.

“You don’t seem in much of a fighting mood either,” Bull commented, throwing a short jab toward her face.

She yanked her head to the side, but they both knew that if he hadn’t pulled the punch she would be spitting out teeth and having her nose reset. Essa sighed and lowered her hands.

“Go talk to him,” Bull ordered.

“He’s busy,” Essa retorted.  

The words sounded more petulant than she wanted them to. She wasn’t whining. He  _was_  busy, and the Inquisition needed their general far more than she and Cullen needed each other.

“Essa.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and stared out into the night, refusing to meet his gaze.

“Is it all said then?” Bull asked roughly.

She darted a curious glance toward him, then shot it back out again against the black.

“If either of you fall at Adamant,” he continued brutally. “Have you said everything you want to say?”

She turned to him, lips curled in a snarl that made him smile.

“Get your ass to the command tent, Boss.”

“Is that an order?” Essa asked.

“If it needs to be. You disobey, I’ll have Krem dock your pay.”

*

The main camp wasn’t quiet; that was, in fact, part of why Essa had chosen to take her party west, a little ahead of the lines. She couldn’t rest with so many of their forces gathered in one place. It made everything too blighted real. She knew that she was not the person best suited for the political and bureaucratic necessities of her office. She didn’t mind gambling with her own life, but she couldn’t face the adulation she saw in eyes that might soon stare sightless and empty at the desert sky.

She was a coward, and that was something Essa had never thought she would say about herself.

She made her way into camp silently, passing Cacique’s reins to a watchman at the picket lines who seemed unreasonably glad to see her despite her grumpy horse. Elin promised the best hay for the stallion and Essa thanked him, feeling the weight of the man’s adoration like a sin she would never be rid of.

She picked her way through the neat rows of tents, nodding and calling quiet return greetings to those still awake by their fires. The tents and campfires grew quieter and sparse as she made her way to the command tent. No sad stretch of beige canvas now, but a proper pavilion all Inquisition red, trimmed in gold, and emblazoned with powerful insignia. She had expected Cullen to hate it, but he had fallen into an impassioned lecture about uniforms, leadership, and symbolism that had her grinning.

By the Mabari, she loved him.

Essa took a breath, and lifted her hand against her own foreboding to knock at the closed tent door.

The canvas rolled back and Cullen stood, framed by the color of blood and power. He wasn’t wearing his armor, and his tunic and trousers were disheveled. Guilt was cold and sharp when it struck.

“I’m sorry I woke you.” Essa spoke softly.  The quiet sounds of the night stole away her apology, tossing it amid the chirrup of insects and the soft crackles of too many fires.

“Would you like to come in?” Cullen offered neither gladness nor reprimand. The candlelight behind him threw his face into shadow and wreathed his hair with golden light.

“If it’s not too much trouble.” The words felt small and stupid as they fell into the night. They hadn’t been alone together in over a fortnight. The time seemed both but a moment and unending.

Cullen stepped back and, as she ducked past him into the tent, Essa saw a hint of smugness in the small smile he gave her.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked politely, closing the door behind them as she paced around the enclosure.

“No, thank you,” her voice broke and she cleared her throat. “Maybe some wine.”

She shrugged out of her leather coat as he poured wine into a pewter goblet. She could feel him waiting, could sense the questions that he wouldn’t ask as she removed her armor, stacking it in a precarious list on the camp stool beside his armor stand. When she turned back to him, she wore only her leggings, a long sleeveless under tunic, and a pair of soft fingerless gloves.

He said nothing about her divestment. It wasn’t exactly uncommon behavior for her, and she suspected it was why the stool was there; he had added a small table for her beside his armor stand back at Skyhold.  Cullen’s gaze slid over her as he passed her the goblet, but still he kept his own counsel, returning to his cot and leaving her to her turmoil. He had gotten very good at waiting her out.

Essa watched as he sank back into his blankets, reclining on his side, posture so deliberately relaxed that she wanted to yell at him. She took a few gulps of wine, glared angrily at the wall of the tent behind him.

“I thought you had gone ahead.” Cullen finally broke the silence that pooled unnaturally between them.

Essa clunked the empty goblet down on his desk and paced toward him, bare feet almost silent on the carpeted floor. So many little niceties, she thought. So many extravagances for the man who didn’t need them, for the general who knew that moral could be bought with shining threads and rich textiles. She sat down in the small space afforded by the curve of his body, her posture tight and rigid as she perched on the edge. She didn’t reach for him, didn’t turn her face toward him. She stared at the carpet beneath her feet fighting rage and desire. When his hand pressed—a grounding, comforting weight on her back—she flinched as if he had struck her.  Neither of them spoke, and she knew that he was waiting to see if she would need him to take back the familiar touch.

“No.” She shook her head in negation of both the thought and his statement.

“Cassandra lied?”

The idea was so ludicrous that she laughed; the sound was dull and harsh in the tent’s quietude.

“No,” she confessed bitterly. “And before you ask, neither did I. I intended to go. I thought it would be easier, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Instead, I’ve been lurking. Like some blighted feral too afraid to come into the firelight, but not brave enough to run alone in the dark.”

“Oh, my darling.”

The whispered endearment would have fallen into the heavy silence behind her, but Cullen had already reached for her. His hand slid from her back to her waist, guiding more than pulling as she finally turned toward him. She stretched out on her side before him and Cullen wrapped her tightly in his arms until she could feel the shift of taut muscles beneath the cool linen of his tunic. His heart beat strong and sure beneath her forehead. Essa burrowed close, breathing in what dreams still clung to him. She smelled leather and sunshine and parchment with traces of lavender and bee balm; the aromatics helped him sleep. She took in a slow, deep breath, and felt her jagged nerves smooth against his steady presence.

“I know that we knew what this was before we started,” she mumbled, the tumble of words echoing inside his embrace. “I just—“

She bit off the words, tried again. “I am such a coward,” she told him on a tearful whisper. “I never thought I would be.”

He caught her chin with one hand, fingers grasping along her jaw in a failed attempt at gentleness. He lifted her face to his, met her lips with a kiss that left her shattered and mute.

“You are no coward, Essa Trevelyan.”

He kissed her again before she could dispute him, lips as close to punishing as she had ever felt them, as if he could imprint his truth on her mouth with his not inconsiderable will. She murmured something stubborn and nonsensical. Cullen’s smile tugged his lips from hers.  He let them wander, teeth skimming in a stinging trail along her jaw that finally turned aside her last attempts to argue. Essa yielded on a slow inhale, the steady rise pressing her breasts softly to his chest. Her head fell back, throat exposed.

“I love you.” It wasn’t the first time she had told him, but there was fear now. Her hands threaded through the hair at the nape of his neck, pulling his lips back to hers for a desperate kiss. “I’m in love with you, and I’m sick of having to hide it.”

“I love you,” Cullen replied, and she nearly swallowed the words, holding them as the pledge they both knew they could not yet be. He chuckled softly against her mouth. “And I didn’t realize you had been hiding anything.”

She smiled and his hand slid down her body, resting on her hip because it belonged there. Her legs tangled with his and the blankets; Essa managed to fight them away, grabbing one edge with her toes and thrusting it from between them. Her hands slipped beneath Cullen’s shirt, calloused fingers traveling in light rasps over his skin. His breath sighed, silent at first, then a groan when her hand slid lower, grazing the laces of his trousers.

“We really shouldn’t,” he cautioned, tongue sliding over her lower lip in complete contradiction to what was probably a very wise warning.

There was still too much to figure out. Caution, she thought, there were a great many reasons for caution, but Cullen’s lips trailed to her neck again, meandered down to the edge of the wide collar of her tunic, and Essa forgot about caution. His teeth found her clavicle, gently worried the flesh over bone until she was panting for breath. They should talk, she knew. Even Bull hadn’t meant the word as a euphemism when he prodded her into going back to camp.  But she didn’t want to talk about her desires or fears with their usual implacable calm. She wanted to beg him to be careful in the weeks ahead, wanted to bargain for promises she knew he wouldn’t make. Essa kissed him again, a desperate, urgent claiming. His grip on her tightened, and she knew that the proof of him would linger, small marks she was only too glad to bear.

“No,” Essa agreed on a broken gasp. “We shouldn’t.”

She hooked one leg over his hip, somehow managed to pull herself closer to him.

“But unless you truly mean it,” she declared quietly. “I don’t want to hear ‘no, we shouldn’t’.”

His eyes searched her face. She would never know what he was looking for, only that he must have found it. Cullen’s eyes, bright with longing, went soft, warm and deep like honey, and when she kissed him again, he moaned softly against her lips, some careful promise that they both knew waited to be broken.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two nightmare chapters left and we'll be through with Adamant. Tell me what you think! :D


	9. Show Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 3k words of smut. NSFW. Directly follows Waiting to Be Broken. For those of you who aren’t so into the extensive smut, this is extra, and can absolutely be skipped though it isn't actually gratuitous in my eyes. There's lots of character and relationships development here.
> 
> Chronologically this falls in camp, just prior to the events of Adamant.

The candles burned low in the interminable moments that they lay lost in the fraught, silent questions of their own daring. Cullen lay on his right side, Essa on her left facing him, their only answers the desperate clinging of lips, soft murmurs of want, and Essa’s whispered “please.” Cullen caught her hand in his, tugged her fingers from the straining laces of his trousers and brought them to his lips for a kiss.

“Slowly,” he reminded her, the word rough and breaking on a groan as she angled herself closer. Her right leg was leg hooked over his hip and now that her hand was no longer between them, she fit too perfectly against him.

“Slowly,” he repeated with a wry smile.

“I know.” She frowned, and he caught her scowl with lips as impatient as she was. She wrenched her hand free, ran both palms over his chest. “By the Mabari, Cullen, I want you. I need to know how much of you I can have.”

She was trembling, cold with nerves now. He had been trying to put some distance between them, slow things down enough to see where they were going, but her unsteady hands and the lust scraped timbre of her voice called him back to her. Cullen kissed her until he thought he would drown in her, until she sighed against his mouth and arched to him, body warming by slow increments.

“I want you too,” he murmured, lips and teeth dragging down her neck. His hand caught her thigh, too rough, he thought, but he didn’t want her having any doubts. He fought for gentleness, rocked once against her and muffled a groan against her neck as Essa’s breath stuttered.

“We have to be careful,” she warned, the words so quiet, Cullen knew that she was saying them to herself.

“We will be.”

He placed one hand in the center of her chest, pushed her a little away and then onto her back. He plucked at the laces of her tunic, opened a narrow v nearly to her waist before bending to place a kiss on the inside of her left breast.

Her hands tangled in his hair, as if she would hold him there. Cullen was only too happy to oblige her, lingering over soft skin with teeth and tongue and lips until she was writhing beneath the attention.

“There are stages to intimacy,” he said. Giving them both a moment to catch their breaths, calm the heavy racing of their hearts. He turned to place a biting kiss on the underside of her left breast, knew that she appreciated the sharp focus of pleasure-pain.

“Have you been reading up on this, Commander?”

There was still fabric between him and his objective; Cullen opened his mouth over the linen, sucked gently until her shirt grew sheer and he could see the mark he had left on her skin bright and pink beneath the wet. He glanced up her body, eyes traveling over the curves of her breasts, the offering of her throat, lips parched from shallow breaths. He held her heavy-lidded gaze, saw a gleam of laughter shining silver amid the grey haze of her desire.

She was teasing him, but Cullen answered her seriously. “No, I’ve been talking to Bull.”

“Bull.” Essa giggled, a sharp jangle of nerves and mirth. Cullen carefully folded back the collar of her tunic, resisted the urge to tear a line down the front, to bare her completely to him. He framed her breasts with the edges, stared down at the contrast of undyed linen, fair skin, and darker scars he had nearly memorized. He placed soft pecks against her pebbling skin and when she spoke again, her words were thick, a slow faltering. “Did not. Use. the word ‘intimacy’.”

Cullen chuckled against her sternum. “No, he didn’t. You’ll forgive my paraphrasing.”

He pulled away then, leaned up a little on his side to pluck at the hem of her shirt. “Let’s be rid of this, shall we?”

Essa nodded and lifted up enough for him to divest her of the garment. He dropped it to the floor behind her. This was still familiar, he thought as she lay flat beside him in her leggings and fingerless gloves. This was not any farther than they had gone before. Anything beyond this was new territory, desperately wanted, but a terrain of uncertainty.

“We need guidelines,” Cullen slid down to place a warm, open kiss against her stomach. Her muscles twitched beneath his lips and she moaned once, the sound traveling through his body like the fire she feared, before she rallied against his determined practicality.

“You are killing my romantic spontaneity, Rutherford.”  

Cullen grinned, teeth pressing, then nipping at the upper curve of her navel before he placed his hand on her belly, propped his chin on his knuckles and stared up at her. He didn’t think he would ever tire of the landscape of her body, the many hues and textures of well-lived in skin. 

“We’ll get to that,” he assured her. “One day. When we’re so familiar with one another that the only thing I can stir within you is pleasure.”

They weren’t supposed to speak of one day, but there were moments that he could not help himself, and this was one, when Essa lay partially beneath him, waiting with hard fought patience like the fulfilment of every wish he had never had the courage to make.

“But tonight?” she asked, biting her lip.

“Tonight is first touches. Is that alright?”

*

Was it alright? Essa’s greedy fingers twitched and she grabbed the sheets beneath her, hands closing into fists to keep from reaching for him, to keep from driving them too quickly. She nodded slowly, met his eyes through the pale, tawny light.

“More than alright.” She sought the comfort of humor. “Do I finally get you naked?”

He smiled. “Maybe.” His tongue darted out over his lips and Essa closed her eyes on a whimper. “Let’s get you naked first.”

She felt the cot shift as Cullen half sat up on the narrow frame. He couldn’t have been comfortable, one leg partially hanging off the far side as he reached for her gloves.

“May I?”

Essa nodded slowly. The anchor had been quiet of late, only seeming to defy her will and Solas’s stability when she was dreaming. Still she too often defaulted to the gloves. They were additional physical focus and she had always found those useful. Cullen slipped off her right glove first and the cool air in the tent hit her skin a moment before his lips pressed to the center of her palm. Essa shuddered.

“I want to know everything you’re feeling,” he murmured, teeth closing briefly on the thick muscle beneath her thumb. The dull pain was a shock of pleasure; it spread through her, heady and sharp like the sky’s first silver fracture before the fury of a summer storm.

“Like I’m in a hurry,” she whispered, trying to convey the sense of urgency as her body clamored for more of his touch.

He yanked off her other glove with brisk efficiency, placed a chaste kiss against her quiet palm. Essa heard the gloves hit the floor somewhere in the vicinity of her discarded tunic and the cot shifted again as Cullen settled back down beside her. His bare chest pressed against her arm and Essa’s eyes flashed open, skittering down his body. He was still wearing his trousers, still obviously as aroused as she was, but beyond the comfortable press of his body against her side, he was no longer touching her. Essa sought his gaze uncertainly.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“Slowing down,” Cullen grinned, the corners of his smile a little cautious. “Trying something a bit different.”

He nodded at her leggings. “Take those off.”

Essa raised one eyebrow at him, ardor cooling to something manageable, instead of a scraping, clawing unfettering beneath too-fitted skin.

“Should I barter with them?” She glanced at his and Cullen laughed sheepishly.

“Will you accept future payment?”

“How ‘future’ are we talking?” Essa took the edge off of her anticipation with a smirk, trusted that he knew she wasn’t asking for more than he was willing to give.

Cullen laughed again, a velvet caress as he leaned in and kissed her soundly.

“You first,” he ordered. “I want time with you before you distract me.”

“Yes, sir.”

He shook his head, eyes lit with playful fondness until she lifted her hips and began wriggling out of her leggings. Essa tossed them aside, glancing away from amber darkening.

“I thought you undressing yourself would be easier,” he confessed into the shadows above them.

“It was for me?” Essa offered and Cullen chuckled.

“So I wasn’t wrong, good to know.” He looked down at her. “Do you ever wear smalls?”

She snickered then, returned her stare to the cheerful exasperation on his beautiful face.

“About five days a month,” she shrugged. “The rest of the time, not so much.”

Cullen snorted. “Don’t let Josie find out. She strikes me as the ‘always wear clean smalls and matching socks in case you’re in a carriage accident’ type of mother.”

Essa giggled, body slowly relaxing amid their banter. Cullen swept the covers over both of them and gathered her close, arm banded across her waist.

“How are we doing?” he asked, placing a kiss on her neck.

“Aside from the fact that you’re making it very difficult for me to grope you…?”

Her right arm was trapped between them, and not even conveniently so, if she hadn’t been still clutching desperately at the covers.

“On purpose,” he replied. “Concen—“

“Don’t you dare lecture me on concentration and discipline right now,” Essa tried to elbow him, but she was calmer, so she couldn’t fault his strategy.

“Perhaps another time.”

He propped his head on his hand, leaned across her to kiss her slowly, hand tracing her jaw, her lips, her chin, skimming down her left arm to tug her fist loose from the linens. He twined their fingers together, kissing his way down her neck.

“What would like?” His palm cradled the back of her hand as he drew her fingers over her skin.

“You,” Essa managed on a gasp. “You touching me.”

He trailed their fingertips to her waist and the combined sensation of his touch and her own made her entire body quake.

“Show me.” His lips moved in whispers against her pulse and Essa guided him down her body, hand shaking as their fingers met the soft tangle of dark curls.

His breath hitched, the abrupt cessation loud in the late night quiet and for a long moment he was utterly still against her before he touched her gently, reverently, his hand still carrying hers with him as witness.

“Maker’s breath,” Essa swore, eyes blind with sensation as she stretched up into their hands. “Cullen…”

His name was a timorous prayer. It shuddered between her teeth, a broken, begging petition.

“I have you.”

The assurance was hushed but steady, echoing in the hollow of her tremulous exhale as Cullen placed his cheek over her heart and sank heavily against her.  The warm pressure grounded her, the scratch of his stubble on her breast distracting her enough from her body’s urgent soaring that she didn’t think she would die from his careful, maddening touch. She wanted to languish there, suffer in exquisite agony for hours, but already she had stopped trembling with cold, her body flickering with something warmer and brighter. She shoved the covers off, opened her eyes to find the tawny brilliance of his as she moved the perfect glide of his fingers a ruthless, infinitesimal fraction.

Essa’s world surged white. Cullen met her desperate kiss and sealed her shattered shout of ecstasy between their lips.

*

“You are a wonder.”

The declaration tore from him, a coarse whisper, a truth too profound to remain unspoken. The candles had long since guttered, until one stalwart flame remained, low in its taper. In that waning light, Cullen watched the fine lines around Essa’s eyes smooth, watched her chest rise high then fall on a sobbing exhale. Tears slid from behind tightly closed lids, her lips and limbs still trembling with aftershocks as he gently stroked her through the last of them, her fingers still clinging to his.

“Essa?”

“I’m sorry.” She struggled to get her other arm from between them, dashed the tears from her face with the back of her hand without opening her eyes. “I don’t know why I’m crying. That was—“ she gave a little gasp as their fingers slid against her. “Is,” she corrected. “Wonderful.”

He smiled, stretched up kiss away the last shimmer of tears. “I think a few tears in this case might be warranted,” he nuzzled behind her ear. “No smoke, my darling. No flames.”

She pulled their joined hands back up her body, the back of his hand low on her stomach. Her fingertips were still slick as they swept across his knuckles.

“Are _you_ crying?” she asked, just as he was about to grab her, roll over with her splayed across him. A reckless impulse he knew better than to indulge just yet.

“No?”

Essa grinned, breath falling with a sigh into a steady rhythm. “Then I don’t have to be happy about it.”

She laughed at herself and when she opened her eyes to search for his in the collecting shadows, her gaze was as clear as first light.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, unable to quell the broad grin he could feel splitting his face.

She stretched beside him, hip pressing against him in a way that had him biting off a moan.

“Wonderful,” she repeated. “More relaxed than I have in months, if you need something to be smug about.”

She smiled, turned her face for a kiss that he had every intention of keeping light and easy between them, but Essa had her own share of stubbornness. She licked into him, mouth still sweet with wine.

“I want to touch you.” She rolled toward him, a small but careful space kept between them as she kissed her way down his jaw, lips a streak of warmth wandering to his neck. “Will you let me?”

He couldn’t touch her properly—and Maker how he wanted to!—but one arm was beneath him and the other hand was still cleaving to hers. Her body curved and the cot rocked slightly as Essa found her balance and ran her tongue along the tension in his throat.

“Cullen?”

Her breath was warm against the moisture she had left behind on his skin.

“Yes, of course,” the confirmation was automatic and he chuckled with her as she glanced back up at his face.

She nodded at his trousers. “Take those off?”

Her order was framed as a question and he kissed her for the consideration even as he began to reluctantly release her hand.

“I’m going to need this,” he said gruffly, flexing his palm against her.

She let go slowly, fingers slipping from his as he struggled out of his sleep pants, refusing to give up any further proximity to her in doing so.

“Do you want the covers back?” she asked, voice unusually small as he settled back down beside her.

“I think you’ll keep me warm enough.” He nipped a scattering of freckles on her shoulder. “Es?”

She was skittish, her eyes darting over him then away. He watched the muscles in her chest clench.

“By the Mabari, Cullen, you are a beautiful…”

He could feel his blush spreading from his face to his neck, knew that his entire body would be flushed before she was done.  

“Are you comfortable?” she asked quietly.

He smiled. She wouldn’t push him onto his back as he had done her. She knew that being prone wasn’t easy for him, though they were working on that as well.

“I am.”

She reached for his hand again, wrapped her fingers in his just as he had, and placed both their hands in the dip of his waist. Her thumb swept out across his hip and she swallowed once before she took a breath and leaned close to whisper against the beat of his heart.

“Show me.”

She followed less hesitantly that she had led and Cullen closed his eyes, back bowing when she wrapped her hand boldly around him. Her fingers were still wet with her own pleasure and they stroked like moonlight, cool and silver over feverish skin. It was not often that he was warmer than she was, but when his eyes found hers Cullen knew that fire was only banked for a moment.

“Tell me how you feel.” There was a gentle twist to her lips, an almost smirk, and he realized that she was seeking calm even as she unmade him. He arched into her hand, more satisfied than he wanted to admit when she gasped at the sudden slide against her palm.

“Tell me,” he countered roughly.

She followed the direction of his hand, clever fingertips learning, questing, gripping with varying pressure until he could barely make out the sound of her voice beyond the roar of his blood in ears.

“I think you’re going to be the end of me,” she said breathlessly. “You feel amazing, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get enough of you.”

“Essa—“

He released her so quickly that she fell back on the cot, a slight frown on her face as he grabbed his discarded trousers.  He covered himself and a cautious smile curved her lips as he took her hand again, pressed her hard against him and thrust against her unflinching touch.

“Let go,” she told him, begged him with lips searching his and fingers clamped and trembling between his knuckles. Her palm made one final, hard slide and as she turned into him again, Cullen closed his lips around one peaked nipple.

Essa cried out, surprising them both with her climax, and Cullen followed her over that dark, glimmering edge.


	10. Apostate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here Lies the Abyss. Departure from canon! :)

_She was smiling when she left him, sadness a faint shadow behind the resolution in otherwise clear grey eyes. He should have kiss her, just in case, but she was as cautious as he was, and now wasn’t the time._

_“If I’m alive two nights from now…”_

_She checks her weapon and armor with the brisk pats and yanks of buckles familiar to warriors, but the staff in her right hand brands her mage. He should have kissed her, Cullen thinks again, as she charges out of the chantry against the impossible, Vivienne, Sera, and Cassandra close beside her._

_He should have told her that she mattered to him. Not just as a weapon against the dark. That she was more than Andraste’s Herald if such were even possible. More than touched by the Maker. That she had given him hope. A rare precious wondering that he had never thought to again feel spreading fledgling wings like worship against the cold and hollow of his chest._

_That she was grace. That she made him long for forgiveness._

_He should have kissed her. Should have told her._

_“If I’m alive two nights from now…”_

_But she isn’t. Cullen lifts her cold body from the snow that has melted, refrozen into a crystalline bier, a cage to hold an empty shell. He brushes blood-tinged ice from her face in a clatter of discordant chimes. Icicles cling in the dark tangle of her hair. She feels smaller than he knows her to be._

_“Cullen?”_

_Cassandra’s voice has lost its strength and he shakes his head once, can only hope she will account the cold for the shaking of his hands._

_“We are too late,” and the words are bitter, black syllables peeling like frostbitten skin._

Cullen woke slowly from the nightmare, surprised to find Essa curved against his back, one arm was wrapped firmly around his waist, the other stretched up at an odd angle behind his head, fingertips toying idly with his hair.

“What are you—?“

Her hand trailed down his stomach, fingers curling against clenching muscles before moving back up in a lazy caress that ended over his pounding heart.

“You were having a nightmare,” she murmured, voice muffled against his back.

“And you stayed close?” he asked, momentarily horrified at the possibilities.

“Seemed safe enough,” she said, breasts shifting warm against him as she shrugged. “Stages of intimacy and all of that.”

“Es…” he sighed, made no move to turn to face her. “You know that my dreams can be violent.”

“I do,” she nodded, chin bumping his spine before she placed a kiss against his shoulder blade. “And by now you have to know that it will take more than you caught in the grip of nightmare or memory to actually hurt me. I can handle a few bruises. I might even give you some in return.”

He caught her hand, pushed his fingers between hers in slow slide before placing her palm back over his heart.

“I don’t want you carrying bruises.”

“But I’m going to,” she countered. “I can carry them on my skin or on my heart. I’ll leave that to you.” She snuggled close, cheek flat against his skin. “Besides, you woke much more quietly than when I call your name from what you’ve decided is a safe distance.”

“I did,” he agreed. “Did you sleep at all?”

She placed another kiss on his back, this one a wandering sigh across an old training scar.

“No, but we both knew I wasn’t going to. I’m glad you could, dreams aside. Are you ready for this?”

Cullen stared into the pre-dawn dark of the tent and listened to the sounds of the waking camp.

“No,” he murmured, reaching for her hand again, placing kisses on each scarred knuckle. “Are you?”

“Pshh…I was born ready.”

Essa laughed and he almost believed her bravado.

*                                                    

She wasn’t ready, but she was smiling when she left him, the shadows in her eyes making the curve of her lips falter just a fraction. He hadn’t been able to prepare her for the reality of a siege and she would never be comfortable with so much death in her name, even if it were for a greater cause than she. It had nearly killed her to wait behind the advancing lines, and when their forces finally broke through Adamant’s gate, Essa had cheered along with them.

She dashed forward through the broken, jagged remains and Cullen called after her giving her statuses and orders even as her eyes darted toward the first bilious wail of demon.

“If you can clear out the enemies on the battlements, we’ll cover your advance.”

“I’ll see it done, Commander.”

He caught her arm before she could charge off again, dropped a kiss on her lips that had their troops cheering nearly as loudly as when the gate had splintered beneath their onslaught. Essa stared up at him, mouth gaping.

“For luck,” Cullen said, mustering a smile. “Now get to work, soldier.”

Essa grinned, a flash of teeth bright as the curve of a scythe through the smoke-choked air before she vanished, wrapped in a cloak of the Veil.  Vivienne, Cassandra, and Sera fell immediately into familiar battle patterns behind her, Cassandra running forward with a shout. Vivienne raised a barrier, casting one brief glance of disapproval that Cullen did not miss. He should have kissed her twice, he thought, with a wave of defiance. Whether from his dream or simply from Essa herself, Cullen had learned not to leave things unsaid, and if his nightmare had been a portent rather than the worries of his heart, well then, at least she knew how he felt.

*

They were in the fucking Fade. Essa practiced her curses, enunciating clearly in three languages, mumbling a few extra dwarven curses since Varric wasn’t around to mock her for them. Every now and then Sera would lift her voice to join her, the edges of her fear temporarily muted, anger encouraged by Essa’s fury. She took a small measure of pride in hearing Sera’s voice strengthen, but beyond that Essa wasn’t speaking. She couldn’t remember the last time she had managed a snarky quip. Her rage was all consuming, rich and coppery like death on the back her tongue. She feared its heat would be her undoing even as she longed for its light.

The battle had been over. It was supposed to be done. There were matters to sort, but it was over. Enough blood had been spilt to last her liftetimes. Lives given in service but done so gladly in her name. No, not her name. _For the Herald of Andraste!_ Their shouts would echo in her nightmares for the rest of her life. Cullen’s voice most of all, and for that Essa wanted to weep.

 _But you’re not the Herald, are you?_ Nightmare whispered in her mind.  _No._   _You could never be. Unworthy. Apostate. Liar. Murderer. Mage-Hunter._

She was all of those things, but then she had never claimed to be anything else. Essa shouldered the putrid litany, charged doggedly forward into flames and darkness, fighting fearlings and wraiths, pride and terror, demons she couldn’t always see even as her own wrath burned hotter and darker than whatever their enemy set upon them in the Fade. She knew the fear demon for what it was now, the creature that had haunted them for months, turning their dreams against them until Cole showed them that they were being attacked by more than their own minds. The creature that sealed away her memories after Corypheus destroyed the Conclave. Now every night of ruined sleep, every memory twisted to hurt those she cared about was a wound begging for vengeance. The rest, she tried not to think about, for it was so much worse.

_You shouldn’t remember. You don’t want to remember. I will make you forget._

_Seems there was a lot I shouldn’t remember,_  Essa snorted, but her humor fell flat even to her.

“Inquisitor?”

“I’m fine.”

She didn’t know who had called to her, could barely make out the sound of their concern over the hissing flames, but her answer had not changed since they began their journey—even when they realized she was essentially blind—and it would not change until her enemy lay dead at her feet. Essa soldiered on, stopped only to incinerate the clusters of seething shadow that Sera insisted were spiders. The fights were ever brief, filled with the terse movements of weary, determined fighters. Essa didn’t know how long they had been in the Fade. Long enough for Sera to stop crying.

Too blighted long.

“Perhaps we might rest a moment,” Vivienne murmured, stepping up beside her, a shimmer of ice and electricity sliding like balm over Essa’s heat-numb skin. “For the girl’s sake if not our own.”

They were all worried about her, but even more so about Sera. She was handling their predicament the worst—not enough arrows, not enough blades—and Essa added that to the long list of sins for which she would never atone.

“Yes, of course,” she sighed.

Vivienne’s hand touched her elbow and Essa flinched at the frission of magic just before her vision cleared.  They didn’t know why she and Cassandra had that effect on her predicament, something about indomitable will if you asked Essa, but they didn’t. They wanted real answers and she didn’t have them. Essa stared into a barren landscape, browns and blacks and greys, leaching swaths of green and pools of reflecting emerald. There was dirt, hills and mountains, and a dark city in the distance. This was what the others faced as she forced herself through ebony blazing.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Upon landing in the Fade, they had discovered that Essa’s vision was not as the rest of theirs. While the rest of them talked of the raw Fade and a desolate terrain, Essa knew only darkness. Blindness. A cage. Fears that persisted from childhood and employed against her as ruthlessly as the flame.

“Of course, my dear.”

They did not understand why Essa’s experience of the Fade was so dramatically different, not only from theirs, but from every experience she’d had before. Some long buried terror, she supposed, remembering tales of being trapped in the root cellar. The trauma remained—she could barely sleep in side for Andraste’s sake—locked in the labyrinth of her mind. She didn’t remember her helplessness, her mind had been resilient enough to protect her from it, and the one thing stronger than Essa’s fear was her stubbornness, the unrelenting power of her personal demons.

Still, that didn’t explain why rage burned so darkly now, standing between her and everyone else.

“You should rest too,” Vivienne added quietly.

She seemed to be taking either her own ignorance or Essa’s suffering personally. Rarely did she leave Essa’s side for long, only combat or to check on the others. It was probably both, Essa thought with a specter’s smile, though she didn’t think Vivienne was pleased with her own protectiveness. Even outside of the Fade, she and Essa saw too little in common. Fin was right, she grew on people, maybe too much.

Essa glanced back toward her weary party, thought that perhaps she liked better being blinded by her own fury and shook her head.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, thankful that Vivienne did not correct her.

She was not fine. She could not bring herself to take refuge among some of her most trusted. Cassandra crouched beside Sera, her posture a testament to both her fatigue and her concern for the rogue. Stroud and Hawke were the least shaken, and the easiest to look in the eyes, but they were her allies, not her friends. Essa paced forward and away, and Vivienne walked with her along a charred and broken trail, long legs pushing against resistant air as if she strode instead through thigh-deep water. The topography before her was still not exactly what the others saw, even with the strange effect diminished by Vivienne’s touch.

“Do you think we have much farther?” Essa asked.

“No.” The word was succinct and somehow encouraging.

Vivienne turned around, leaving Essa to either follow or face her limitations alone. Her hand slipped from Essa’s arm and for a moment the flames crowded in, a riot of hot color before there was only darkness and the scorching roar of conflagration filling her ears.

Nightmare had fed on her fears for so many weeks that the demon believed it knew her greatest and before today—was it still today?—the demon would have been right. But that was before the Inquisition marched on Adamant. Before Essa learned what it was to be chosen, then learned that they would see her as a fraud. So many lives given gladly to the Bride’s Herald.

No, she no longer feared the flames. She had walked through fire for too long now to fear a pyre of her own making.

“Shit,” Sera muttered, a mantra she had rarely ceased repeating. “Fuck. Shit. Crap.”

Essa couldn’t see her travel-stained, Fade-creased companions, but she also had no time to be grateful for that dubious gift. Vivienne caught her arm again and Essa’s vision snapped back like a rebounding barrier, filled with the small, exhausted band.

They were clustered together on a rough outcropping, boots just beyond the reach of sickly green. Cassandra murmured something to Sera meant as comfort and Hawke pressed waterskins and dry field rations into hands that did not want them. Nightmare continued his assaults, taunting each of them with fears and secrets and darkest misery. Essa could only assume the demon slithered through their minds as well, dragging private horrors into the midst of all of them when the sharing was feared more than the fact.

 _How many mages did you kill in Ostwick?_ Nightmare droned, and Essa knew the words were for all of them when Vivienne’s eyes widen slightly for a fraction of a breath.

“As many as I had to,” Essa replied for all of them to hear. “And as many as I would again.”

She had regrets in her life, but those were not among them.

She released Vivienne’s arm and paced away again, fortified by her fury. She had forgotten its strength, forgotten what she could accomplish with that rage made manifest. She turned away from their refuge, reached out with her left hand, called a pillar of flame from a sky filled with an endless roil of smoke, sooty and furious, spinning like a hurricane. It was the only things she could see, that charcoal storm, Its eye holding the only shimmer of green beyond the quiet anchor and her stolen memories.

“Unnecessary,” Hawke reproved gently as the warrior stepped up beside her.

Hawke didn’t touch her and Essa was glad. She forged purpose in the black furnace of her growing rage.

“Necessary,” Essa countered quietly, voice harsh from disuse.  Had she spoken against the Nightmare only moments ago?

Hawke passed her a waterskin and Essa took it without arguing, carefully dodging the warrior’s fingers and trying not to notice how empty the bladder felt.

“I have to put it somewhere,” she said, swallowing roughly, taking another small drink. “Skin itches when we aren’t fighting, temptations come whispering.”

“You sound like the boy in the hat.”

“Cole,” Essa said absently. “And I probably do.”

“We haven’t much farther.” Hawke took back the waterskin and left her, walking back to discuss more useful subjects with Cassandra and Stroud. Essa could feel their questions pressing like bars of iron all around her, hotter than the flames beneath her feet.

“We should continue,” Essa called, not waiting for their agreement. Vivienne would stop her again when she pushed them too hard. She had lost count of how many times she had already done so.

She took point, trusting Hawke and Stroud to spread out on broad flanks. Sera was a torrent of willful rebellion, refusing to accept the things around her and Cassandra kept close to her, her sword and shield a greater comfort than Essa’s fire or Vivienne’s grace.

“Inquisitor!” Essa could hear splashing, though there was no water in her world. “Essa, a moment!”

She paused, waited for Cassandra to reach her.

_You are bringing them to me, Inquisitor._

“I am,” Essa muttered aloud. “You will wish I hadn’t.”

“The Divine—the spirit—whatever she is, she is just ahead,” Cassandra said urgently, tiredly. “Do you see her?”

Essa shook her head.

“Just there,” she offered her hand and Essa took it, Cassandra’s shaken faith rattling her own as they stared through their own brutal versions of the Fade.

“This is it then.” Essa drew a smoky breath, felt it sting as it filled her lungs. “We face the Nightmare and this ends. We go home.”

 _There is no going home for you, Essa._ A different voice this time, one more familiar and once treasured.  No, she thought heatedly. Not once. Still. A hundred years of imitation would not corrupt his memory.

 _I am looking forward to ending you,_ she thought anger so cold that the flames guttered around her.  Laughter drifted, warm like a long faded summer, twined with the sound of Nightmare’s more sinister amusement.

 _Oh, he’s not here,_ Nightmare assured her laughing. _Some paltry creature, one whose interest you piqued long before you became powerful enough for mine._

The flames around Essa roared. She barely heard the counsel of the Divine nor the hurried plans the others made. There was a brief impression of the landscape opening as they traveled through a small tunnel.

“Nightmare’s Lair is just ahead,” Cassandra’s voice was stronger now. She belonged in battle.

“Let’s be done with this,” Stroud added.

Essa lifted her chin. “You ready to go home, Sera?”

“You bet your arse.”

“The Fade reacts to your presence,” Vivienne counseled, worry hidden in rich velvet as she came again to Essa’s side. “Much more strongly than I have ever seen before. You must use that against it.”

The demon Essa couldn’t see.

She nodded. “Point me at it, Knight-Enchanter.”

*  

“Go!” Essa shouted. “We’re right behind you!”

Her vision had cleared with the Divine Spirit’s sacrifice and the weakening of the demon. She wished Vivienne luck figuring that one out. At this point it was something Essa was willing to take on the faith she was slowly recovering now that she wasn’t encased in darkness and fire.

They had defeated the remaining aspect of Nightmare. The work messy, but shorter than they had expected now that her rage had its true focus. Sera and Cassandra took injuries, but nothing they wouldn’t heal. Essa watched Cassandra haul Sera toward the open rift and Vivienne nodded once before she followed them, guarding their backs. Essa dragged Stroud to his feet, noted the twisted angle of his left foot and started after them, Hawke just behind.

She almost didn’t believe her eyes—so new again to trusting them—when the spider demon returned, falling from above to loom between them and their only way out of the Fade. For one heart-shuddering moment, she believed them lost.

“Go,” Hawke’s voice broke through Essa’s temporary despair. “I’ll cover you.”

“No.” Stroud could barely stand on his own; Essa rolled her eyes when he continued. “You were right. The Grey Wardens caused this. A Warden must—“

“Corypheus is mine!” Hawke shouted and Essa wanted to smack her across the back of the head.  They didn’t have time for this.

“Hawke stays behind,” Essa said cutting off the tangled string of their words as the pair began arguing over self-sacrifice. “Stroud! Can you stand?”

He eased his weight from her arm, tested his ankle and eyed the distance to the rift.

“Yes—I believe—“

Essa cut him off again. “Then, go, I’ll be just behind you. The wardens will need you.”

He spared Hawke what she was certain was a meant to be a meaningful glance, an acknowledgement of the Champion’s sacrifice. Hawke didn’t spare Essa another word, raising her sword in both hands and charging the monstrous spider.

“Warriors,” Essa muttered.

She followed Stroud only enough to see the warden reach the rift. Cassandra pulled him to safety and Essa jerked her chin once in acknowledgement and in order.

“Go.”

“No!”

Cassandra shouted the word, but Essa could not hear her. She watched the negation shake from her friend’s lips, pale eyes framed in ash and blood as she scrambled to hold Essa’s gaze, as if she could drag her through the demon, through the shimmering green between them with her will alone.

Essa closed the rift between them.

She turned back to the demon and cast a barrier around the warrior beneath it, grabbing Hawke’s attention before dropping a column of flame on the creature.

“What are you doing?!” Hawke demanded, her voice nearly drowned by charred screams.

“Never leave an enemy alive at your back,” Essa shouted back, spinning away from one flailing leg, striking against the hardened carapace with her spirit blade. “It was a bad strategy, leaving you to certain death and leaving this thing alive.”

Hawke grunted, brought her sword down on another of the creature’s legs, bisecting the support in a spray of fadestuff and hot ichor.

“It was our only strategy,” she snapped, falling in beside Essa and handing her a belt of potions.

“It wasn’t.” Essa shrugged, slung the belt around her waist and secured it as Hawke charged back in against another skittering leg. Two down on one side, one on the other. If they could get the demon on its belly, it would be short, messy work. “Besides, that’s really not how we play around here.”


	11. Circles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here Lies the Abyss. Continued departure from canon. Essa and Hawke post-fight. tw: injury, gore. the usual? lol
> 
> Covered a lot here. Thinking there's going to be an epilogue of sorts before we move onto the Winter Palace. Your thoughts so far???

"I’m shit at healing,” Essa apologized, kneeling in the gore-strewn Fade-dirt beside a mostly prone Marian Hawke.

“Not surprised,” Hawke’s chuckle was short, mirth quickly twisting to a grimace of pain. “Finally remembered you’re a mage. Anyone ever tell you you’re fucking insane, Trevelyan?”

Essa laughed softly, tried to concentrate enough past her own swimming head to summon her flagging magic. Her mana was low, and the lyrium potions on her belt weighed nearly as heavy as Hawke’s injuries. It had been a messy fight, and they were hardly accustomed to fighting together, but the job was done. The demon had been hacked and burned into perhaps more pieces than strictly warranted.

“A time or two,” she answered and stretched aching, trembling arms before her. Essa fought out of her gloves and shoved aside the widest tears of leather to place her bare palms against the other woman’s legs.

“Maker, you’re warm,” she mumbled. “No wonder you melted Rutherford’s cold shoulder.”

Essa smiled. “I don’t think it was my hands.”

“No.” Hawke wasn’t Cullen’s biggest fan, and Essa supposed she couldn’t blame her, but then the woman hadn’t exactly been fond of Essa either. Most mage supporters weren’t.

“It was probably that shield bash,” Hawke griped, a breath hissing through her nose at Essa’s less than adroit touch. “If I had known you had that in your arm, knight-enchanter, I would have given you mine earlier. Maker’s balls, woman, where did you learn that?”

“I wasn’t always a mage,” Essa reminded her, hands moving down toward her feet. “And you’re faster without one, so why do you bother?”

“Getting older,” she snarked. “Slower. Thought the extra armor might be worth the extra weight.”

“Good plan. You do know that the ground is not the best place for that extra armor?”

It had been the first thing the warrior did when she thought she was being left behind and when Essa had turned back to join her, she had nearly tripped over the hastily discarded shield.  Hawke had charged the demon with her sword hefted in both hands and a cry of defiance louder than the spider’s screech.

Essa admitted to being a little smitten.

When Hawke didn’t answer her sarcastic query, Essa glanced back at her face to make certain the champion was still conscious.

“Still here,” she said, not opening her eyes. “And you should be glad I dropped it. I am. I never thought I’d see anyone fight with a staff and a shield.”

“I wouldn’t call it fighting.” Essa had been hopelessly overburdened, but she had clung to the shield, to the familiar, trusting her body’s memory when her mind was racing too quickly ahead. She had used the steel as an effective enough weapon until it cracked beneath the demon’s attacks. “Nice touch keeping that upper edge sharp though.”

“Defense doesn’t come easily to me,” Hawke drawled a little more slowly than her last quip. She punctuated the confession with a wan smile.

Essa frowned. The warrior’s teeth were spattered with blood and Essa reached out, placed the cleanest of her knuckles against Hawke’s bottom lip.

“Internal or external? “ she asked.

“I have a few loose teeth,” Hawke told her breathless with pain. “And my nose is going to look like yours in a few days, but I’ll live. Legs are bad though. Start at my feet?”

Her legs were more than just bad. Hawke had struck the killing blow and as the spider demon began its final frenzied convulsions, she had been pitched feet first toward the ground at considerable speed. When she hit, Hawke’s legs had snapped in too many places to count, the sounds of bones breaking loud and groaning, like slow moving ice.

“I already did,” Essa whispered worriedly. “Can you not feel them?”

“Oh, I can feel them.” Hawke’s chuckling sigh spattered blood from between clenched teeth. “Must be worse than I thought if you’re already working.”

“I told you I’m shit at healing. You should have saved that last potion.”

“Then it would be you down here,” Hawke retorted. “And where would we be?”

“Worse off than we are now, my friend.” Essa ran both hands over Hawke’s feet, channeled healing into shattered bones. “How’s that?”

“Better,” Hawke grunted. “It’s a lot isn’t?”

“For a real healer?” Essa answered helplessly. “Yeah. You’re going to be bedridden for a few weeks even after they’re done.”

“And for you?”

Essa couldn’t decide if she should laugh or cry. She was too tired for either.

“For me, I just need you patched up enough to hobble with me through the rift. I don’t care if it hurts.”

“Brutal,” Hawke mused. “You could just drag me through.”

Essa glanced down at her busted right knee. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side. Might be wise to have us both sort of standing.”

“Fine,” Hawke sighed. “Do you have any lyrium potions left?”

Essa closed her eyes, reached for one of the flasks with a shaking hand.  “I do.”

“How many?”

“Four.” And each was a vow to herself waiting to be broken.

“Oh, we should be fine,” Hawke said, relaxing visibly. “Take your time. I’ll just…”

Essa opened her eyes just as Hawke was closing hers. The champion’s breathing was shallow but steady, and considering how much pain she had to be in, Essa understood her surrendering to oblivion. She reached for one of the potions, hefted the flask in her hand, felt the weight of her brother’s life in her palm. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. 

Then she lifted the flask to her lips, tore the cork from it with her teeth, and choked down the singing blue.

*

She was not herself by the time it was done, but Hawke had one leg that would hold her and it was—quite fortunately—the opposite of Essa’s mostly good leg. Essa clutched her staff with her right hand, Hawke with her trembling left, and dragged them slowly forward through the rift. The bladed end sank into the ground, slowing their progress and she found herself thankful for each halting step. Essa could only pray that there was no longer battle awaiting them on the other side.

They tripped over something on the way out and Essa let loose a strong of multilingual curses.

“Better not let Varric hear that one,” Hawke laughed as they finally stumbled through.

Essa let go of Hawke, turned back to close the rift with the warrior still clinging to her, keeping them both upright as Essa’s Fade sensitive body shook with effort. She went down toward one knee, but Hawke’s fist kept her from crumpling in on her injury.

“Not until you’ve had your romantic reunion, Trevelyan.”

Essa slowly turned in the direction of Hawke’s stare. Across the burning and the broken and the rubble of Adamant’s courtyard, Cullen stood with Cassandra and no small number of wardens, templars, and Inquisition soldiers. Cullen and Cassandra had already fallen into a defensive formation, backs to one another, shields raised as they angled themselves to intercept whatever came through the rift.

There was grief tangled with the exhaustion on his face and when he saw them, there was a single breath of hope, too swiftly replaced by anger.

“Or not,” Hawke amended. “I’ll knock him on his ass if you want me too.”

Essa laughed. “You let go of me and you’ll be on your own ass,” she observed dryly. Cullen and Cassandra finally relaxed their stances and crossed the courtyard.

There was an eerie, awful silence as everyone waited for someone else to speak first. Essa didn’t think that she had enough voice to carry and she wanted to feel the shape of her name on his lips more than she wanted anything.

“You’re late,” Cassandra called.

Essa’s breath left her in a near-delirious laugh.

“My apologies, Seeker Pentaghast,” she tipped her head to one side, knocked temples with Hawke who made a sound of distress wrapped within a snicker.

“You owe me so many drinks, Trevelyan.”

Essa laughed. “Yes, I do.”

She stabbed the blade of her staff into the ground, leaned heavily on it as Hawke adjusted her grip on Essa’s shoulders. The champion was taller than she was and Essa could only imagine what they looked like, hunched like crones and cackling. Essa’s head swam, and she planted her feet before she thought better of it.

The bones in her knee grated together and Essa’s vision went grey.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to gasp as she toppled.

“Fuck us,” Hawke muttered and they both went down.

*

“What in the Void did you think you were doing?”

Essa was shaking, somehow conscious even though she was beyond exhausted, probably still bleeding. Cullen knew he shouldn’t be berating her, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He had thought that watching her vanish into a rift was the worst of his nightmares realized, but when Vivienne, Cassandra, Sera, and Stroud stumbled out without her…

“You were supposed to be right behind them,” he accused, placing her on the cot in his tent without any regard for the filth that covered her and the remains of her armor.  She slumped forward, elbows wobbling on her thighs, back curved in a weary c. “Cassandra said—“

“I was finishing the mission,” Essa interrupted stonily. “I am not one to leave an enemy at my back, nor to waste a Champion when Thedas has such great need of them.”

Her tone dared him to dispute her strategy. She and Hawke had barely had two fully functioning legs between them and yet they had stumbled out a rift with ridiculous grins on their faces, arms around one another’s shoulder and laughter rending the air. He hadn’t realized the extent of their injuries until they fell. Now, Essa’s body had taken all the healing it could for the night. She had refused to stay in the healing ward. That she had sat through Solas’s attention without complaining was a miracle that still terrified him.

“And while I usually have uncommon levels of understanding for two-legged emotions, especially yours,” Essa continued, attempting—and failing—to deliver the quip with any heat. “Tonight, I am out. I need  _light_ , Cullen.”

She stared toward the small cluster of mostly unlit candles on his desk. When they did not ignite beneath her will, frustrated tears filled her eyes.  Cullen turned immediately to light them for her and once the tent filled with the flickering amber glow, she sighed in homecoming.

“Thank you.”

“What else do you need?” His voice was still too sharp, nerves still stretched past breaking by the events of the day.

“I need a barrel of water,” she said wearily, not seeming to notice the one that had already been brought. “And someone who can stand to be close enough to me to keep me from drowning in it.”

Her face fell as she looked around frantically. Cullen pressed a bucket between her knees just before she wretched up whatever meager contents remained in her stomach. He had learned the signs in the hours that she spent among the healers. They claimed shock and trauma the cause, but Cullen understood that—for her own reasons—she was rejecting the lyrium she had consumed in the Fade. Essa’s mind was stronger than her body, and she would always see the stuff as poison.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered when she was done. “I know—“

“You know nothing,” Cullen interrupted, sharper than he wanted as he moved the bucket away and handed her a clean rag. “Nothing if you think that we—that I–would rather have you lost.”

She glared up at him from beneath the tangle of her hair. It was dank and matted with blood and ichor and who knew what else. Her eyes were bruised, the flat grey of her glare pale and weary, shaking and blue. Beyond that lay a glimmer of heat and Cullen found himself absurdly relieved to see even the faintest spark of her temper.

“Do you even realize what losing you could have cost us?” Cullen demanded. He wanted to take the words back the moment they left his traitorous lips, but— “You are still our only means of closing the rifts. You are—”

Still strong enough to handle him at his worst. 

Essa held up one hand, stopped him from rattling off the list of her strategic importance. Her eyes rounded, life brightening them with realization.

“You didn’t think I was coming back.” Her words stung, sharp and bitter.

Cullen’s rant stumbled to a halt. He blinked at her and reached up to rub the back of his neck. He stopped and stared bleakly at the filth that had transferred from Essa to his glove. He had carried her to the healers, but he had yet to put his hands on her with any comfort.

“It was a distinct possibility,” he confirmed shortly. “What would have happened if you and Hawke had been lost or killed?”

Lost. He’d said the word three times now. What was it Enchanter Maya used to say about threes being portents?

Essa laughed, the sound sliding from gallows mirth to quiet sobbing before he could take offense to her inappropriate sense of humor. She buried her face in her hands and Cullen stared down at her in astonishment.

“I didn’t,” she mumbled, so quietly that Cullen had to crouch down to hear her repeat the words. “I didn’t. It never occurred to me that Hawke and I would fail.”

He ripped his gloves off, pried her busted, bloody fingers carefully from her face. It hadn’t fared much better and he foolishly expecting anger or contrition to have mingled with grime and tears. There was none. Essa held tightly to his hands.

“I’m so sorry that I scared you,” she said softly, staring down at their entwined fingers. “I’m sorry that I came back to you reeking of lyrium. I’m sorry that I’m not the Herald of Andraste and that you have to figure out what to do with that misplaced faith. But whatever my task is in this world, Cullen, it isn’t done. I guess I knew that.” She shrugged. “I thought you did too.”

He had. Once. But that faith had fallen with her into the rift and it had not yet recovered.

“Cullen?” She lifted her chin slowly, seemed to finally notice then the barrel only a few paces away. “Oh,” she smiled. “Is that for me?”

Cullen felt something ease in his chest and nodded. “Your bath.”

“Thank the Maker.”

Cullen tugged one hand free from her loose grasp and reached for the knife at his belt, intending to simply cut her now useless armor from her body.

Essa flinched.

“Es?” 

Her recoil brought Cullen immediately to his knees. His knife fell with a soft thud to the carpet at her feet.

She didn’t meet his eyes.

“When we first landed in the Fade,” she began, twisting her hands in her lap. “I didn’t sound like me. I couldn’t see anything, just darkness, but I could feel the flames all around me, hear them crackling around my memories, like a song I’d sung all my life.” She took a shuddering breath. “Cassandra wasn’t certain that I was me. I don’t blame her, but…” Essa shook her head. “As we made our way to its lair, one of the Nightmare’s favorite torments was of you believing me possessed when I returned. You promised, remember?”

For a long moment,Cullen said nothing. Then he nodded. “I remember.”

“Good.” Her eyes slipped shut and she swayed where she sat. 

“Es…darling, let’s get you clean.”

“Yes, please.”

*

She was asleep before she was clean, and even with the sickly sweet scent of lyrium hanging on her, Cullen wouldn’t have given the honor of her care to anyone else. He did not take a proper breath until she was stripped of the Fade and filth, tucked snugly in his bed in one of his extra tunics, one foot left from underneath the covers for when she eventually grew warm. Cullen cleaned his armor as best he could in the dim light, changed into another set of leather, and set his surcoat aside to be cleaned later. He dropped a kiss on Essa’s forehead.

“I’ll be back,” he whispered in case she could hear him.

His second in command met him at the door to his tent, body effectively blocking his exit.

“Seeker Pentaghast says you’re to get some sleep, ser.”

“Excuse me.”

“Said I was to send for her if you proved…difficult. Two hours, she said, at the least.” Rylen sighed. “You’re not going to be difficult, are you?”

Cullen rubbed his eyes, glanced up toward the sky. Dawn loomed and the next day would have greater need of him than these few quiet hours.

“No,” Cullen shook his head. “I won’t be difficult. No more than two.”

It was easier than he expected, leaving everything in Rylen and Cassandra’s hands for a pair of hours. He slipped out of his armor and clothes with quick, routine motions and was settling on the floor beside his cot when Essa murmured his name.

“I won’t break.” She didn’t open her eyes, but she struggled through the blankets to get one hand free. She reached for him and Cullen slipped carefully between covers, trying not to jostle her even as she burrowed close against him. “Not today…” She sighed. “Not for a long time yet.”

He closed his eyes, torn between storming the Maker’s ears with thanksgiving and further petitions for her continued safety.

“Sleep…” Essa whispered, pillowing her head on his shoulder.

Cullen wrapped his arm around her gingerly, lay with his fingers just brushing the pulse in her throat. He fell asleep a tangle of prayer, counting the beats of her heart, and marveling at its strength.

_“You promised,” Essa whispered, tears gathering in eyes that had not been her own for days. “You swore, Cullen! You swore on everything that you hold holy, that you would not–”_

_The end of her entreaty was stolen from her, and Cullen knew that they had lost her again. Dorian and Vivienne had duplicated the barrier from the Shrine of Dumat, but containment was not a luxury, it was bitterest torment. One that he, Cari, and Fin had endured without food or sleep for two long days._

_They were all fading. Reason had been lost in the quiet hours of the second night. He could hear the others outside the chapel. Every now and then a heavy thud would strike the door as Blackwall gave in to despair and frustration. There was already too much blood spilt. Too many tears._

_Cullen almost didn’t see Cari reach for the barrier. Fin grabbed her wrist, his grip harsher than his voice as he shot Cullen a murderous glance. “You can’t.”_

_One touch and whatever was held within would become light and dust and memory._

_“One of us must.” Cari lifted her chin, tears glittering in the silver blue energy of the field. “Cullen–”_

_“She’s still in there,” Fin begged._

_“Only because you won’t let her go.” Cari returned. “Let her go, Fin. Please, Cullen–”_

_The demon inside spouted a litany of venom and fury and Cari’s voice broke on a sob. Early on, they had tuned out the voice that was not Essa’s, but exhaustion was taking its toll and Rage was creeping in. Cari took a quivering step back, and Fin took her weight with the hand that still held her arm in a punishing grasp._

_“If the Mabari waits for any heart, you know that he waits for Essa,” Cari said. “She will go, and she will wait for us at the Maker’s side.”_

_“Do you really believe that?” Cullen asked softly._

_Not that it mattered. Essa was right. He had promised. No cages. Not for her, and the demon that crawled beneath her skin was as much a prison as the power around it._

_Cari nodded, tears flowing freely now. “I know that,” she replied firmly._

_The demon smiled and the expression was so not Essa that Cullen knew that the creature thought it had found them at their weakest._

_“I wish I did,” Cullen replied._

_Then he reached through the edge of violent, ephemeral blue and watched love turn to ash._

Cullen woke slowly, Essa’s heart still pounding beneath his hand.

“It’s me,” she whispered, leaning over him. Her eyes wide and tear-filled, the arm she leaned on shaking with effort.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked, terrified that he had lashed out in the grip of his dream. She still didn’t feel right, fragile and exhausted and smelling like bad dreams.

“No, of course not.” She lowered herself over against him, warm and alive. “It’s just—“ She shook her head. “You called my name. Another bad dream?”

“Yes,” Cullen gathered her close. “You really killed the demon?”

“We did,” Essa whispered. “Though I’m not certain what it sent us was any worse than what we send against ourselves.”

“No.” He placed a kiss against her hair, breathed in the scents of smoke and lyrium, grey and blue like the lingering wisps of his nightmare. “I don’t think it was.”

 


	12. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After leaving the Inquisition in the Western Approach, Essa has some loose ends to tie up before she can return to Skyhold. She arrives two days after the victorious army and is surprised to Cullen demanding that Cassandra choose a replacement for him. This includes Ghosts and Regrets, a previously written one shot that has always been very important to my characterization of Cullen. I felt it fell here very appropriately as we face Perseverance.

Essa opened her eyes to the Fade. The chaotic landscape spoke nothing of reality, mimicking neither the ruins within which they camped, nor Skyhold nor Haven– the most recent places to nestle close to her heart. Too often, she had found herself in a fade-twisted version of the Circle at Ostwick, or in a shadowed forest clearing just beyond the festive chaos of the Grand Tourney. Lately they had all been the haunting settings of Nightmare’s choosing, but these were all absent upon her aggressive assault.

She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since her first three at Adamant when she had been too exhausted to do much more than eat, sleep, and thank the Maker for the too-brief hours that Cullen allowed himself to join her.

That respite had been short-lived. She had left his tent after the fourth night when she realized she was causing him nightmares, skin still clinging to the cloying scent of the lyrium she’d imbibed. It was bad enough that she was healed and rested enough to be trapped again in her own; she refused to add to his burdens. He already carried too many.

Memories of the Fade haunted her with renewed intensity. Essa may have been unusually familiar with traveling to the Fade in dreams, but going there physically had been something else entirely. She hadn’t been prepared for her blindness, for the raging sound of an endless inferno. While everyone else experienced more or less the same insubstantial terrain, Essa had felt the ground beneath her feet as solidly as any other.

But she had been blind to it. Caged behind darkness and fire.

 _You are a creature of Dreaming_ , Solas had told her once.  _The Fade answers you more strongly than most I have seen._

She had thought it a grand compliment, but it was not her will that the Fade answered. No, it rose up with offerings for her deepest self, manifest offerings of power and fear and rage.

Desire.

Now she wondered if she were a spirit somehow trapped beyond her own world. Perhaps Essa had traveled into the Fade too many times, binding or destroying demons, saving mages from their abominable fates. Perhaps she had failed. It would only have taken once. Maybe she had died there, or become trapped there, and what was now had become a reflection of her, a creature of her dreams and memories. Would she even know it?  

“You are yourself,” Compassion assured her, appearing close in the swirling ether of greys and greens.

Essa had to trust that his words were truth. A pretty lie would never comfort her, but being herself could mean too many things.

“You are as you have always been,” Cole said with as little ambiguity as he could manage. “You are the child who went into the darkness. You are the girl who grew on starlight and love.”

Essa turned to hug him tightly. He had come to see her off and he would stay beside her body, knife at the ready should she not return.

“Thank you,” Essa whispered. “And don’t hesitate.”

“I won’t.” He had already promised.

Cole understood the danger of what she was doing as much as the necessity. Essa’s nightmares weren’t the twisted workings of an exhausted mind. Someone was attacking her in the Fade, manipulating her memories and fears to sculpt dreams into terrors. Someone who had worked in concert with the greater demon that she and Hawke had slain. She hadn’t slept properly in weeks and now, when her body should have been recovering from battle injuries, Essa was becoming a danger to herself and others. The sleepwalking wouldn’t have been so bad, but the sleepcasting…Essa shuddered. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened if it had been Cullen who had found her. Thank the Maker she had left his tent three nights before.  Cacique had simply kicked her in the thigh, hard enough that she would carry the horseshoe shaped bruise for months. It had been the very careful snap of his hoof that kept bone from cracking.

She deserved that and more.

She hadn’t lost control of her magic in nine years. Not since Hope was born. By the Mabari, if she could survive labor without torching anyone by accident, then there was no reason for her to be sleep walking with fire in her fists. That had been the final infraction. Solas had agreed something had to be done.

Essa had ridden away the army behind early on a clear morning when they were still when they were still crossing leagues of parched golden sand. She would not enter the Fade from camp, nor return to it so closely thereafter. She refused to face Cullen reeking of still more of lyrium, and even Cassandra had mentioned that it might not be particularly prudent to go waltzing into the Fade with so many templars around.

Templars who still watched her for signs of corruption after the mess at Adamant.

She had taken Solas, Cassandra, and Cole with her, Essa finding no small comfort in knowing that whatever might happen, the three of them could eventually bring her—no, not her, her body—down. She would forever marvel at what a comfort it was being surrounded by people who were both willing and able to kill her.

She shaped the Fade as she walked, relieved to find it as it had always been in Dreams. Her spirit blade was an easy presence in her left hand, and she held a version of her staff in her right, the stone and steel were hard, familiar weights. She could feel the anchor pulsing, as real in dreams as waking. Essa summoned a cobbled path, dark and solid, mortared with rich moss and tiny blue flowers, and she walked. She walked until the Fade became a garden, until her will was a threat to the familiar demon who wished her harm.

She walked long enough for her meager strength to diminish. A shamefully short distance she thought as, ahead, the stones began to crumble and the walk fell into aching blank space.

“I had thought to tempt you,” the demon said, low and coaxing as it appeared on the broken path. “Once upon a time.”

The treasured voice wasn’t quite right this time, and after so many years, the demon who wore Diar’s shape no longer filled her with heartbreak and remorse. Essa was too tired for either.

“But you are no longer the broken weeping that I first heard amid the flames of your birth, mage.”

“I haven’t been,” Essa replied flatly. “Not for some time.”

He smiled, green eyes crinkling at the corners perfectly. A lock of black hair fell over his forehead.

“Did you love me at all?” he asked.

Ah, Essa thought, Rage then. She should have known after Adamant which of her demons was the strongest. They all wore Diar more often than anyone else from her past, but she never knew which vice lay behind his beautiful face. Not until it spoke and revealed its agenda. She was relieved to find that it was only Rage. Rage was strongest, but it was also the part of herself she was closest to accepting.

“How long have we been doing this?” Essa asked.

The demon frowned, and the expression was so perfectly ripped from her memories that for a moment Essa wanted to weep.

“You have not counted the days?” he asked in surprise. “Marked the passing of every night since you roasted me over our marriage bed?”

He took a step toward her and Essa closed her eyes.

“Don’t you get tired?” He sounded concerned. “Tired of walking so carefully between their houses of cards? ‘Be careful, Essa.’ ‘Don’t destroy the fragile, Essa.’”

She was beyond tired. Exhaustion had driven her into the Fade, forcing their confrontation. She had known she couldn’t go on as she had.

Diar’s hand closed over hers, warm and too familiar for all that the sensation was only a persistent memory. The past was vivid and alive in the Fade. Once it had tempted her with promises, but that demon had clung to her until it starved.

“They are weak,” she agreed.

Her weapons vanished in silence.

“I still miss you.” It was an admission she should have made to another. Essa realized then that she and Cullen still had so many confessions to make between them.

Diar’s hands came to her waist and Essa drew in a breath. He smelled like sunshine and horse and bee balm. His touch was gentle and his lips hovered over hers, breath sweet with mint, his rage a smoky lingering. The faint traces curled across over her skin as Essa closed the distance between us.

There was a gasp of surprise as their bodies met. They stood flush from knees to chest and when his hands trailed up her sides, Essa sighed like surrender.

And drove her spirit blade through his head.

The demon died screaming in agony, but it was not the first time Essa had watched Diarmont Stanhope’s body contort in horrible death. She dragged the weapon down through his body with a scream of rage that the demon might have been proud of had it not met its end from a wrath far stronger than its own.

Essa collapsed among the carnage, laughing and sobbing with shock and relief. The Fade flexed around her in an unstable swirl and she buried her face in shaking hands. Rage had been right. She was tired, and she had known that she didn’t have the energy for a prolonged fight. It had been a gamble that her subterfuge would even work, and Essa was grateful that it had, but she still needed to make the long journey back. Essa closed her eyes and reached for consciousness.

“She struggles,” Cole said softly.

“Is she still herself?” Cassandra asked.

“She is,” he answered. “She has destroyed Rage, but she is weary.”

“Her weakness will attract others,” Solas said worriedly.

“It will,” Cole agreed.

Their voices came to her as if from a great distance. Essa swam through a heavy, dark sea to reach them, body disconnected and adrift. When a cool hand touched her face she jolted closer toward their anxious whispers.

“I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there,” Solas murmured. His fingers pressed—gentle and cool—to the center of her forehead. “And slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight.” His fingers swept down across her cheek and his next words were pressed against Essa’s skin. “But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.”

Essa lifted her face from her hands as Solas stepped out of the encroaching fade-darkness.

“You had us worried, my friend.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry.” Essa struggled to her feet. “I’m really tired, Solas.”

He smiled and held out his hand. “You can sleep as much as you wish,” he vowed. “But you must first wake up.”

She slipped her hand in his and there was a certainty in the touch that those born of the Fade always seemed to lack.

“You promise?” Essa asked.

“I promise,” he said gently. “Cassandra, Cole, and I will stand watch. We will see you home.”

Essa smiled wanly, but the expression slowly gained strength.  She closed her eyes to Fade, and when she opened them again, found herself staring up into Solas’s eyes and surrounded by sunlight.

“There you are.” Cole patted her leg as if to reassure them both.

“It is good to have you back,” Cassandra added succinctly.

Essa smiled. “I’m going to sleep like I did before,” she warned. “All the way back to Skyhold.”

Cassandra laughed. “We’ll take the long way home.”

*

The Inquisition’s march back from Adamant was shorter than the march there, but for Cullen it stretched on across Orlais, every day filled with the too much time for quiet contemplation. There were still a hundred small details that needed tending—tallies of losses and prisoners,  constant resupplies, and larger concerns that awaited judgment once everyone had returned to Skyhold—but there was an overarching air of jubilation among the returning forces. They had won the day, and they had lost fewer lives than Cullen expected in the siege. The Herald and the Champion. There were already songs around the campfires of Essa’s and Hawke’s great battle in the Fade.

Varric was probably working on the novel.

“Letter for you, ser.”

Cullen had a moment to hope that the scout had brought word from Essa, but the familiar handwriting belonged instead to his sister. He set the carefully folded parchment aside; he did not need Mia’s admonishments to know that he was not giving his best to any who deserved it.

“Thank you.”

“Ser?”

The scout waited and for a moment Cullen blanked on his name.

“Yes?”

“Scouts spotted the Inquisitor yesterday, ser, near Val Firmin.”

“Thank you, Merrick.”

The scout bowed and Cullen dismissed him. Halfway home then. He wondered if she would be waiting when they returned or if she would already be back in the field, pursuing notoriety and glory and vying for the Empress’s attention. Cullen sat at his desk, camp stool infinitely more comfortable than the tiny useless chair in his office. He reached for Mia’s letter, cracked the seal, and before he had read the first two lines, he set it down again, too ashamed to continue.

He didn’t recognize the man he had been.  Sometimes this helped him reconcile who he had been with the man he wanted to be, but sometimes the disconnect just made him feel trapped in the life he had left behind.  He struggled against his past. Wanted to lash out at even the most benign reminders. Burn it all to ash so that nothing remained to haunt him. He never knew how to feel about Mia’s letters. She lectured a man she loved but was angry with. A man he couldn’t imagine being worthy of that love. Because that man was the same one he hated.  A shadow from whom Cullen carried bitter memories and guilt. The ghost of a monster.

He still saw their faces in his dreams. He wondered how many haunted him from the Fade and how many were just his own conscience tormenting him with the lives he had helped destroy. Trying to judge his reality against the weight of what he deserved drove him mad some nights. Cullen wished he could name them all with the same solemn resolution that Essa spoke of her list of sins. She carried their names—their lives—with a cold, stalwart grace that spoke of an acceptance he wasn’t certain he wanted. But, they were different, he and Essa. The number of lives he had changed, harmed, or ended in the names of Andraste and the Maker could not be confined to a single square of folded parchment. He could not count the infractions. The injustices.

Because he could never really know.

When he looked back on his time in Kirkwall, there was only a haze of righteousness and fear. He might not recognize the man he had been, but he could still taste his terror, feel his fury running like poison in his veins. Every choice Cullen had made had been so that he could at least hope to sleep at night. So that no one had to suffer as he had suffered at Kinloch Hold. He still had dreams, Fade-trapped memories that had nothing to do with Nightmare. That demon was gone, but his dreams would never leave him. They clutched at his mind and skin with the same lurid tenacity of long fallen Desire demons. For a time, believing that he was doing the Maker’s work had helped beat those nightmares back.

It was the duty of the righteous to punish the wicked. Cullen didn’t know when he had started believing that, but the not so subtle perversion was dark and troublesome. When he left his childhood home, he had believed with all of his heart that it was his honor to protect the righteous from the wicked.

And those two things were not the same.

For too long he had believed that they were. He looked back on the path his life had taken and tried to find the point at which such darkness overtook him. There should have been a harsh line, a jagged cut between the youth he had been and the man he called monster in an attempt to distance himself from the years of fear and rage and self-importance.

He believed he was doing the Maker’s work. Believed that cruelty could be justified. Essa said that sometimes people needed killing. She was unshakeable in her resolve, just as he had been.

But he had been wrong. Who was to say that years from now she wouldn’t find herself a stranger as she looked back on her past? That she wouldn’t brand herself a monster?

Meredith’s madness had broken him. He knew that his name was merely added to a long list of sufferers, and that his claims were nothing compared to those whose murders, rapes, and torture she had either participated in or allowed to happen. Tranquility had been wielded like a too casual sword and with equal horror. He should have seen her for what she was, but he had needed her authority. Needed a firm voice, a constant support against the abominations of his past. 

Cassandra tried to tell him that he was victim. That Meredith used her charisma and authority against his fears and needs to manipulate him, but he rejected the idea as ludicrous. Cullen Rutherford had only been a victim once in his life and those events had nearly destroyed him and his faith. No, he carried the blame of Kirkwall. Too many times he had chosen to be the villain rather than the victim, and when he hadn't known the consequences of his ambivalence, he should have. He was a strategist, for Andraste’s sake. Being able to accurately read people was imperative. If he could so easily be fooled by a senior officer, then what madness had induced Cassandra to recruit him for the Inquisition?

Or did she just want a gullible lackey willing to bloody his hands and soul for her cause?

He knew the thought was uncharitable, and most days he knew it for passing paranoia, but that didn’t stop the whispers of doubt. Didn’t keep them from taking a startling hold on his reality in the worst of moments.  

Today was one of the bad days and there had been too many bad days since Adamant. Cullen opened a drawer low on his desk, dropped Mia’s unread letter on top of a box he had begun to consider opening. He had given everything to the Chantry, willingly, but with eyes blinded by faith and fear. He did not have those impediments now. He would not give less to the Inquisition.

*

Essa did not return to Skyhold ahead of the Inquisition. She rode instead to the Hinterlands, slept too much beneath the open sky, picked up odd jobs and ran errands for farmers and herbalists, tried not to fight Solas too much on his daily healing sessions. She spent a few days at the templars’ new holding, was welcomed with surprisingly genuine warmth by a man who had once tried to kill her. By the time word reached them that Cullen had returned to Skyhold, Essa was reassured by Cassandra that the lyrium she had taken to enter the Fade was gone from her.

She was anxious to see him, but nervous too. Essa did not go straight to the command tower when they returned. Instead she made first for the barn and then to her quarters for the bath she knew Cari would have waiting.

“How long have they been back?” Essa asked as her sister combed rosemary and peppermint oil through her wet hair.

“Two days,” Cari said, pushing down gently on her shoulders. “Rinse.”

Essa submerged, shook out hair that now fell past her shoulders. Cari ran her fingers through the water, threading through her hair until she was satisfied that it was clean, tugging until Essa surfaced with a gasp.

“You should go see Cullen,” Cari told her quietly. Her gaze was a bruise of violet worry above her scarf and Essa thought that it might have been the first time Cari had called him by his name.

“What’s wrong?” Essa asked, standing immediately. She wrapped a towel around her head, but didn’t bother with a second for her body as she stepped out of the tub. She reached for her magic drying her skin with the sudden rush of nerves and warmth.

“I don’t know.” Her sister shrugged, a reasonable enough imitation of Essa that she grinned.

“Nice.” Essa reached for one of her long linen robes. “You keep that up and you’ll start creeping me out.”

“Does it?” Cari asked seriously.

“Does it creep me out, you preparing to mimic me all the way to the Winter Palace?” Essa yanked on the long contoured column, cinched it at the waist with an attached belt in the same dark blue. “Nah.”

She glanced down at the snug, supportive bodice. “This your doing?”

Cari smiled. “It was a joint effort of mine and Lady Josephine’s.”

“Of course it was.” Essa shoved her feet–sockless–into the boots that Cullen had given her nearly a year ago, hiding a smirk at Cari’s grimace. “Thank you for pampering me. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

There were so many things she needed to talk with him about. Essa dropped a kiss on Cari’s soft cheek.

“You smell too good to be me.”

“I know.” Cari’s laughter followed her down the stairs.

*

Cullen wasn’t in the command tower, which in and of itself wouldn’t have worried Essa, but coupled with Cari’s ambiguous warning, and Essa was worried by the time she found him with Cassandra.  They were having the newest, most terrible version of an old argument, one that made even less sense to Essa now that they had returned from siege victorious.  The rise and fall of their voices was a harsh tumble of desperation from both sides. Cassandra’s fear for her friend was obvious in her pale eyes, and lanced Essa’s heart even before Cullen rushed by her as shadowed, broken “forgive me” torn from his lips.

Essa rocked on her heels, torn between racing after him and shocked by the cold certainty that he wouldn’t want her to.

“And people say  _I’m_  stubborn. This is ridiculous.”

Cassandra caught Essa’s darting gaze, jerked her head in an order no less forceful for its silence. Essa stepped farther into the room, stared toward the fireplace as Cassandra folded her arms across her chest and glared after Cullen. She didn’t look exhausted. She had every reason to, but the woman did not appear to have shared the long journey with Essa back from Adamant.  

“Cullen told you that he’s no longer taking lyrium?” she demanded.

“Yes…” Essa frowned. Old news that. She was more surprised that Cassandra didn’t know she knew. “And I respect his decision.”

“As do I, not that he’s willing to listen. Cullen has asked that I recommend a replacement for him. I refused. It’s not necessary. Besides, it would destroy him. He’s come so far.”

Essa’s denial must have shown on her face. Cassandra grunted, a short syllable of approval. They knew that they had allies in one another.

“Mages have made their suffering known,” she continued, pacing listlessly. “But templars never have. To be bound to the Order, mind and soul, with someone always holding their lyrium leash…”

Essa flinched, stomach roiling and Cassandra nodded once in understanding. Essa’s hands tightened into fists, holding back a hundred poisoned memories.

“Cullen has a chance to break that leash, to prove to himself—and anyone who would follow suit—that it’s possible. He  _can_  do this. I knew that when we met in Kirkwall. Talk to him. Decide if now is the time.”

As if it was her decision. Essa turned away pacing toward the fire, watching the flames rise to greet her like old friends. Behind the certainty in Cassandra’s voice was a whisper of regret, and that frightened her more than the ghosts she had seen in Cullen’s eyes. Cassandra was right about one thing, she needed to talk to him, but no matter how it broke her, the decision was his own.


End file.
